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FRENCH  WAYS 
AND  THEIR  MEANING 


FRENCH  WAYS 
AND  THEIR  MEANING 


BY 

EDITH  WHARTON 

AUTHOR  OF  "the  REEr,"  "SUMMER,"  "THE  UARNE"  AND 

"the  bouse  or  muth" 


D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  LONDON 

1919 


COPYKIGHT,    1919,    BY 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COIMPANY 

Copyright,  1918,  igig,  by 

INTERNATIONAL   MAGAZINE    COIIPAN 


PRINTED   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES    OF   AMERICA 


Callege 
library 


PREFACE 


This  book  is  essentially  a  desultory  book, 
the  result  of  intermittent  observation,  and 
often,  no  doubt,  of  rash  assumption.  Having 
been  written  in  Paris,  at  odd  moments,  during 
the  last  two  years  of  the  war,  it  could  hardly 
be  more  than  a  series  of  disjointed  notes;  and 
the  excuse  for  its  publication  lies  in  the  fact 
that  the  very  conditions  which  made  more  con- 
secutive work  impossible  also  gave  unprece- 
dented opportunities  for  quick  notation. 

The  world  since  1914  has  been  like  a  house 
on  fire.  All  the  lodgers  are  on  the  stairs,  in 
dishabille.  Their  doors  are  swinging  wide, 
and  one  gets  glimpses  of  their  furniture,  reve- 
lations of  their  habits,  and  whiffs  of  their 
cooking,  that  a  life-time  of  ordinary  inter- 
course would  not  offer.  Superficial  differ- 
ences vanish,  and  so  (how  much  oftener)  do 
superficial   resemblances;  while  deep  unsus- 


ol0f;407 


yi  Preface 

pected  similarities  and  disagreements,  deep 
common  attractions  and  repulsions,  declare 
themselves.  It  is  of  these  fundamental  sub- 
stances that  the  new  link  between  France  and 
America  is  made,  and  some  reasons  for  the 
strength  of  the  link  ought  to  be  discoverable 
in  the  suddenly  bared  depths  of  the  French 
heart. 

There  are  two  ways  of  judging  a  foreign 
people :  at  first  sight,  impressionistically,  in  the 
manner  of  the  passing  traveller;  or  after  resi- 
dence among  them,  "soberly,  advisedly,"  and 
with  all  the  vain  precautions  enjoined  in  an- 
other grave  contingency. 

Of  the  tw^o  ways,  the  first  is,  even  in  ordi- 
nary times,  often  the  most  fruitful.  The  ob- 
server, if  he  has  eyes  and  an  imagination,  will 
be  struck  first  by  the  superficial  dissemblances, 
and  they  will  give  his  picture  the  sharp  sug- 
gestiveness  of  a  good  caricature.  If  he  settles 
down  among  the  objects  of  his  study  he  will 
gradually  become  blunted  to  these  dissem- 
blances, or,  if  he  probes  below  the  surface,  he 


Preface  vii 

will  find  them  sprung  from  the  same  stem  as 
many  different-seeming  characteristics  of  his 
own  people.  A  period  of  confusion  must  fol- 
low, in  which  he  will  waver  between  contra- 
dictions, and  his  sharp  outlines  will  become 
blurred  with  what  the  painters  call  "repen- 
tances." 

From  this  twilight  it  is  hardly  possible  for 
any  foreigner's  judgment  to  emerge  again  into 
full  illumination.  Race-differences  strike  so 
deep  that  when  one  has  triumphantly  pulled 
up  a  specimen  for  examination  one  finds  only 
the  crown  in  one's  hand,  and  the  tough  root 
still  clenched  in  some  crevice  of  prehistory. 
And  as  to  race-resemblances,  they  are  so  often 
most  misleading  when  they  seem  most  instruc- 
tive that  any  attempt  to  catch  the  likeness  of 
another  people  by  painting  ourselves  is  never 
quite  successful.  Indeed,  once  the  observer 
has  gone  beyond  the  happy  stage  when  sur- 
face-differences have  all  their  edge,  his  only 
chance  of  getting  anywhere  near  the  truth  is 


viii  Preface 

to  try  to  keep  to  the  traveller's  way,  and  still 
see  his  subject  in  the  light  of  contrasts. 

It  is  absurd  for  an  Anglo-Saxon  to  say: 
"The  Latin  is  this  or  that"  unless  he  makes  the 
mental  reservation,  "or  at  least  seems  so  to 
me";  but  if  this  mental  reservation  is  always 
implied,  if  it  serves  always  as  the  background 
of  the  picture,  the  features  portrayed  may  es- 
cape caricature  and  yet  bear  some  resem- 
blance to  the  original. 

Lastly,  the  use  of  the  labels  "Anglo-Saxon" 
and  "Latin,"  for  purposes  of  easy  antithesis, 
must  be  defended  and  apologised  for. 

Such  use  of  the  two  terms  is  open  to  the  easy 
derision  of  the  scholar.  Yet  they  are  too  con- 
venient as  symbols  to  be  abandoned,  and  are 
safe  enough  if,  for  instance,  they  are  used 
simply  as  a  loose  way  of  drawing  a  line  be- 
tween the  peoples  who  drink  spirits  and  those 
who  drink  wine,  between  those  whose  social 
polity  dates  from  the  Forum,  and  those  who 
still  feel  and  legislate  in  terms  of  the  primiEval 
forest. 


Preface  ix 

This  use  of  the  terms  is  the  more  justifiable 
because  one  may  safely  say  that  most  things  in 
a  man's  view  of  life  depend  on  how  many 
thousand  years  ago  his  land  was  deforested. 
And  when,  as  befell  our  forbears,  men  whose 
blood  is  still  full  of  murmurs  of  the  Saxon 
Urwald  and  the  forests  of  Britain  are  plunged 
afresh  into  the  wilderness  of  a  new  continent, 
it  is  natural  that  in  many  respects  they  should 
be  still  farther  removed  from  those  whose  hab- 
its and  opinions  are  threaded  through  and 
through  with  Mediterranean  culture  and  the 
civic  discipline  of  Rome. 

One  can  imagine  the  first  Frenchman  born 
into  the  world  looking  about  him  confidently, 
and  saying:  ''Here  I  am;  and  now,  how  am  I 
to  make  the  most  of  it?" 

The  double  sense  of  the  fugacity  of  life, 
and  of  the  many  and  durable  things  that  may 
be  put  into  it,  is  manifest  in  every  motion  of 
the  French  intelligence.  Sooner  than  any 
other  race  the  French  have  got  rid  of  bogies, 
have  "cleared  the  mind  of  shams,"  and  gone 


X  Preface 

up  to  the  Medusa  and  the  Sphinx  with  a  cool 
eye  and  a  penetrating  question. 

It  is  an  immense  advantage  to  have  the 
primaeval  forest  as  far  behind  one  as  these 
clear-headed  children  of  the  Roman  forum 
and  the  Greek  amphitheatre;  and  even  if  they 
have  lost  something  of  the  sensation  "felt  in 
the  blood  and  felt  along  the  heart"  with  which 
our  obscurer  past  enriches  us,  it  is  assuredly 
more  useful  for  them  to  note  the  deficiency 
than  for  us  to  criticise  it. 

The  French  are  the  most  human  of  the  hu- 
man race,  the  most  completely  detached  from 
the  lingering  spell  of  the  ancient  shadowy 
world  in  which  trees  and  animals  talked  to 
each  other,  and  began  the  education  of  the 
fumbling  beast  that  was  to  deviate  into  Man. 
They  have  used  their  longer  experience  and 
their  keener  senses  for  the  joy  and  enlighten- 
ment of  the  races  still  agrope  for  self-expres- 
sion. The  faults  of  France  are  the  faults  in- 
herent in  an  old  and  excessively  self-contained 
civilisation;  her  qualities  are  its  qualities;  and 


Preface  xi 

the  most  profitable  way  of  trying  to  interpret 
French  ways  and  their  meaning  is  to  see  how 
this  long  inheritance  may  benefit  a  people 
which  is  still,  intellectually  and  artistically,  in 
search  of  itself. 

Hyeres,  February,  1919. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

Preface     v 

I.     First  Impressions 3 

II.     Reverence     .      : 20 

III.  Taste 39 

IV.  Intellectual  Honesty 57 

V.      Continuity 76 

VI.     The  New  Frenchwoman 9S 

VII.    In  Conclusion 122 


Note. — In  the  last  two  chapters  of  this  book  I  have  incorporated, 
in  a  modified  form,  the  principal  passages  of  two  articles  published 
by  me  respectively  in  Scribner's  Magazine  and  in  the  Ladies^  Home 
Journal,  the  former  entitled  "The  French  as  seen  by  an  American" 
(now  called  "  In  Conclusion  "),  the  other  "  The  New  Frenchwoman." 


FRENCH   WAYS 
AND   THEIR  MEANING 


I 

FIRST  IMPRESSIONS 
I 

HASTY     generalisations     are     always 
tempting  to  travellers,  and  now  and 
then  they  strike  out  vivid  truths  that 
the  observer  loses  sight  of  after  closer  scrutiny. 
But  nine  times  out  of  ten  they  hit  wild. 

Some  years  before  the  war,  a  French  jour- 
nalist produced  a  "thoughtful  book"  on  the 
United  States.  Of  course  he  laid  great  stress 
on  our  universal  hustle  for  the  dollar.  To  do 
that  is  to  follow  the  line  of  least  resistance  in 
writing  about  America:  you  have  only  to  copy 
what  all  the  other  travellers  have  said. 

This  particular  author  had  the  French  gift 
of  consecutive  reasoning,  and  had  been  trained 
in  the  school  of  Taine,  which  requires  the  his- 
torian to  illustrate  each  of  his  general  conclu- 
sions by  an  impressive  array  of  specific  in- 

3 


4      French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

stances.  Therefore,  when  he  had  laid  down 
the  principle  that  every  American's  ruling 
passion  is  money-making,  he  cast  about  for  an 
instance,  and  found  a  striking  one. 

"So  dominant,"  he  suggested,  "is  this  pas- 
sion, that  in  cultivated  and  intellectual  Boston 
— the  Athens  of  America — ^which  possesses  a 
beautiful  cemetery  in  its  peaceful  parklike 
suburbs,  the  millionaire  money-makers,  un- 
willing to  abandon  the  quarter  in  which  their 
most  active  hours  have  been  spent,  have 
created  for  themselves  a  burying-ground  in  the 
centre  of  the  business  district,  on  which  they 
can  look  down  from  their  lofty  office  windows 
till  they  are  laid  there  to  rest  in  the  familiar 
noise  and  bustle  that  they  love." 

This  literal  example  of  the  ruling  passion 
strong  in  death  seems  to  establish  once  for  all 
the  good  old  truth  that  the  American  cares 
only  for  money-making;  and  it  was  clever  of 
the  critic  to  find  his  instance  in  Boston  instead 
of  Pittsburg  or  Chicago.  But  unfortunately 
the  cemetery  for  which  the  Boston  millionaire 


First  Impressions 


is  supposed  to  have  abandoned  the  green 
glades  of  Mount  Auburn  is  the  old  pre-revo- 
lutionary  grave-yard  of  King's  Chapel,  in 
which  no  one  has  been  buried  since  modern 
Boston  began  to  exist,  and  about  v^hich  a  new- 
business  district  has  grown  up  as  it  has  about 
similar  carefully-guarded  relics  in  all  our  ex- 
panding cities,  and  in  many  European  ones  as 
well. 

It  is  probable  that  not  a  day  passes  in  which 
the  observant  American  new  to  France  does 
not  reach  conclusions  as  tempting,  but  as  wide 
of  the  mark.  Even  in  peace  times  it  was  in- 
evitable that  such  easy  inferences  should  be 
drawn;  and  now  that  every  branch  of  civilian 
life  in  France  is  more  or  less  topsy-turvy, 
the  temptation  to  generalise  VvTongly  is  one 
that  no  intelligent  observer  can  resist. 

It  is  indeed  unfortunate  that,  at  the  very  mo- 
ment when  it  is  most  needful  for  France  and 
America  to  understand  each  other  (on  small 
points,  that  is — we  know  they  agree  as  to  the 
big  ones) — it  is  unfortunate  that  at  this  mo- 


6      French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ment  France  should  be,  in  so  many  superficial 
ways,  unlike  the  normal  peace-time  France, 
and  that  those  who  are  seeing  her  for  the  first 
time  in  the  hour  of  her  trial  and  her  great 
glory  are  seeing  her  also  in  an  hour  of  inevita- 
ble material  weakness  and  disorganisation. 

Even  four  years  of  victorious  warfare 
would  dislocate  the  machinery  of  any  great 
nation's  life;  and  four  years  of  desperate  re- 
sistance to  a  foe  in  possession  of  almost  a  tenth 
of  the  national  territory,  and  that  tenth  in- 
dustrially the  richest  in  the  country,  four  such 
years  represent  a  strain  so  severe  that  one  won- 
ders to  see  the  fields  of  France  tilled,  the  mar- 
kets provided,  and  life  in  general  going  on  as 
before. 

The  fact  that  France  is  able  to  resist  such 
a  strain,  and  keep  up  such  a  measure  of  normal 
activity,  is  one  of  the  many  reasons  for  admir- 
ing her;  but  it  must  not  make  newcomers  for- 
get that  even  this  brave  appearance  of  "busi- 
ness as  usual"  does  not  represent  anything  re- 
sembling  the   peace-time   France,   with   her 


First  Impressions 


magnificent  faculties  applied  to  the  whole 
varied  business  of  living,  instead  of  being  cen- 
tred on  the  job  of  holding  the  long  line  from 
the  Yser  to  Switzerland. 

In  1913  it  would  have  bc^n  almost  impossi- 
ble to  ask  Americans  to  picture  our  situation 
if  Germany  had  invaded  the  United  States, 
and  had  held  a  tenth  part  of  our  most  impor- 
tant territory  for  four  years.  In  191 8  such  a 
suggestion  seems  thinkable  enough,  and  one 
may  even  venture  to  point  out  that  an  unmili- 
tary  nation  like  America,  after  four  years  un- 
der the  invader,  might  perhaps  present  a  less 
prosperous  appearance  than  France,  It  is 
always  a  good  thing  to  look  at  foreign  affairs 
from  the  home  angle;  and  in  such  a  case  we 
certainly  should  not  want  the  allied  peoples 
who  might  come  to  our  aid  to  judge  us  by 
what  they  saw  if  Germany  held  our  Atlantic 
sea-board,  with  all  its  great  cities,  together 
with,  say,  Pittsburg  and  Buffalo,  and  all  our 
best  manhood  were  in  a  fighting  line  centred 
along  the  Ohio  River. 


8      French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

One  of  the  cruellest  things  about  a  "people's 
war"  is  that  it  needs,  and  takes,  the  best  men 
from  every  trade,  even  those  remotest  from 
fighting,  because  to  do  anything  well  brains 
are  necessary,  and  a  good  poet  and  a  good 
plumber  may  conceivably  make  better  fighters 
than  inferior  representatives  of  arts  less  re- 
mote from  war.  Therefore,  to  judge  France 
fairly  to-day,  the  newcomer  must  perpetually 
remind  himself  that  almost  all  that  is  best  in 
France  is  in  the  trenches,  and  not  in  the  hotels, 
cafes  and  "movie-shows"  he  is  likely  to  fre- 
quent. I  have  no  fear  of  what  the  American 
will  think  of  the  Frenchman  after  the  two 
have  fraternized  at  the  front. 

II 

One  hears  a  good  deal  in  these  days  about 
"What  America  can  teach  France;"  though 
it  is  worth  noting  that  the  phrase  recurs  less 
often  now  than  it  did  a  year  ago. 

In  any  case,  it  would  seem  more  useful  to 
leave  the  French  to  discover  (as  they  are  do- 


First  Impressions 


ing  every  day,  with  the  frankest  appreciation) 
what  they  can  learn  from  us,  while  we  Ameri- 
cans apply  ourselves  to  finding  out  what  they 
have  to  teach  us.  It  is  obvious  that  any  two 
intelligent  races  are  bound  to  have  a  lot  to 
learn  from  each  other;  and  there  could  hardly 
be  a  better  opportunity  for  such  an  exchange 
of  experience  than  now  that  a  great  cause  has 
drawn  the  hearts  of  our  countries  together 
while  a  terrible  emergency  has  broken  down 
most  of  the  surface  barriers  between  us. 

No  doubt  many  American  soldiers  now  in 
France  felt  this  before  they  left  home.  When 
a  man  who  leaves  his  job  and  his  family  at 
the  first  call  to  fight  for  an  unknown  people, 
because  that  people  is  defending  the  prin- 
ciple of  liberty  in  which  all  the  great  demo- 
cratic nations  believe,  he  likes  to  think  that 
the  country  he  is  fighting  for  comes  up  in  ev- 
er^' respect  to  the  ideal  he  has  formed  of  it. 
And  perhaps  some  of  our  men  were  a  little  dis- 
appointed, and  even  discouraged,  when  they 
first  came  in  contact  with  the  people  whose 


lo    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

sublime  spirit  they  had  been  admiring  from  a 
distance  for  three  years.  Some  of  them  may 
even,  in  their  first  moment  of  reaction,  have 
said  to  themselves:  "Well,  after  all,  the  Ger- 
mans we  knew  at  home  were  easier  people  to 
get  on  with." 

The  answer  Is  not  far  to  seek.  For  one 
thing,  the  critics  in  question  knew  the  Ger- 
mans at  home,  in  our  home,  where  they  had  to 
talk  our  language  or  not  get  on,  where  they 
had  to  be  what  we  wanted  them  to  be — or  get 
out.  And,  as  we  all  know  in  America,  no  peo- 
ple on  earth,  when  they  settle  in  a  new  coun- 
try, are  more  eager  than  the  Germans  to  adopt 
its  ways,  and  to  be  taken  for  native-born 
citizens. 

The  Germans  in  Germany  are  very  dif- 
ferent; though,  even  there,  they  were  at  great 
pains,  before  the  war,  not  to  let  Americans 
find  it  out.  The  French  have  never  taken  the 
trouble  to  disguise  their  Frenchness  from  for- 
eigners; but  the  Germans  used  to  be  very 
clever  about  dressing  up  their  statues  of  Bis- 


First  Impressions  ii 

marck  as  "Liberty  Enlightening  the  World" 
when  democratic  visitors  were  expected.  An 
amusing  instance  of  this  kind  of  camouflage, 
which  was  a  regular  function  of  their  govern- 
ment, came  within  my  own  experience  in  1913. 
For  the  first  time  in  many  years  I  was  in 
Germany  that  summer,  and  on  arriving  in 
Berlin  I  was  much  struck  by  the  wonderful 
look  of  municipal  order  and  prosperity  which 
partly  makes  up  for  the  horrors  of  its  archi- 
tecture and  sculpture.  But  what  struck  me 
still  more  was  the  extraordinary  politeness  of 
all  the  people  who  are  often  rude  in  other 
countries:  post-office  and  railway  officials,  cus- 
toms officers,  policemen,  telephone-girls,  and 
the  other  natural  enemies  of  mankind.  And  I 
was  the  more  surprised  because,  in  former 
days,  I  had  so  often  suffered  from  the  senseless 
bullying  of  the  old-fashioned  German  em- 
ploye, and  because  I  had  heard  from  Germans 
that  state  paternalism  had  become  greatly  ag- 
gravated, and  that,  wherever  one  went,  petty 


12    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

regulations  were  enforced  by  inexorable  offi- 
cials. 

As  it  turned  out,  I  found  myself  as  free  as 
air,  and  as  obsequiously  treated  as  royalty,  and 
I  might  have  gone  home  thinking  that  the 
German  government  w^as  cruelly  maligned  by 
its  subjects  if  I  had  not  happened  to  go  one 
evening  to  the  Opera. 

It  wsLS  in  summer,  but  there  had  been  a  cold 
rain-storm  all  day,  and  as  the  Opera  House 
was  excessively  chilly,  and  it  was  not  a  full- 
dress  occasion,  but  merely  an  out-of-season 
performance,  with  everybody  wearing  ordi- 
nary street  clothes,  I  decided  to  keep  on  the 
light  silk  cloak  I  was  wearing.  But  as  I 
started  for  my  seat  I  felt  a  tap  on  my  shoulder, 
and  one  of  the  polite  officials  requested  me  to 
take  off  my  cloak. 

^'Thank  you:  but  I  prefer  to  keep  it  on." 
''You    can't;    it's   forbidden.     Es    ist   ver- 
boten/' 

"Forbidden?    Why,  what  do  you  mean?" 
"His  Majesty  the  Emperor  forbids  any  lady 


First  Impressions  13 

in  the  audience  of  the  Royal  and  Imperial 
Opera  House  to  keep  on  her  cloak." 

"But   I've    a   cold,    and    the   house   is   so 

chilly " 

The  polite  official  had  grown  suddenly 
stern  and  bullying.  "Take  off  your  cloak,"  he 
ordered. 

"I  won't,"  I  said. 

We  looked  at  each  other  hard  for  a  minute 
— and  I  went  in  with  my  cloak  on. 

When  I  got  back  to  the  hotel,  highly  indig- 
nant, I  met  a  German  Princess,  a  Serene 
Highness,  one  of  the  greatest  ladies  in  Ger- 
many, a  cousin  of  his  Imperial.  Majesty. 

I  told  her  what  had  happened,  and  waited 
for  an  echo  of  my  indignation. 

But  none  came.  "Yes — I  nearly  always 
have  an  attack  of  neuralgia  when  I  go  to  the 
Opera,"  she  said  resignedly. 

"But  do  they  make  you  take  your  cloak 
ofif?" 

"Of  course.    It's  the  Emperor's  order." 

"Well — I  kept  mine  on,"  I  said. 


14    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

Her  Serene  Highness  looked  at  me  incredu- 
lously. Then  she  thought  it  over  and  said: 
"Ah,  well — you're  an  American,  and  Ameri- 
can travellers  bring  us  so  much  money  that 
the  Emperor's  orders  are  never  to  bully 
them." 

What  had  puzzled  me,  by  the  way,  when  I 
looked  about  the  crowded  Opera  House,  was 
that  the  Emperor  should  ever  order  the  ladies 
of  Berlin  to  take  their  cloaks  off  at  the  Opera; 
but  that  is  an  affair  between  them  and  their 
dressmaker.  The  interesting  thing  was  that 
the  German  Princess  did  not  in  the  least  re- 
sent being  bullied  herself,  or  having  neuralgia 
in  consequence — but  quite  recognised  that  it 
was  .good  business  for  her  country  not  to  bully 
Americans. 

That  little  incident  gave  me  a  glimpse  of 
what  life  in  Germany  must  be  like  if  you  are 
a  German;  and  also  of  the  essential  difference 
between  the  Germans  and  ourselves. 

The  difference  is  this:  The  German  does 
not  care  to  be  free  as  long  as  he  is  well  fed, 


First  Impressions  15 

well  amused  and  making  money.  The 
Frenchman,  like  the  American,  wants  to  be 
free  first  of  all,  and  free  anyhow — free  even 
when  he  might  be  better  off,  materially,  if  he 
lived  under  a  benevolent  autocracy.  The 
Frenchman  and  the  American  want  to  have  a 
voice  in  governing  their  country,  and  the  Ger- 
man prefers  to  be  governed  by  professionals, 
as  long  as  they  make  him  comfortable  and 
give  him  what  he  wants. 

From  the  purely  practical  point  of  view  this 
is  not  a  bad  plan,  but  it  breaks  down  as  soon 
as  a  moral  issue  is  involved.  They  say  cor- 
porations have  no  souls;  neither  have  govern- 
ments that  are  not  answerable  to  a  free  people 
for  their  actions. 

Ill 

This  anecdote  may  have  seemed  to  take  us  a 
long  way  from  France  and  French  ways;  but 
it  will  help  to  show  that,  whereas  the  differ- 
ences between  ourselves  and  the  French  are 
mostly  on  the  surface,  and  our  feeling  about 


1 6    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

the  most  important  things  is  alw?ys  the  same, 
the  Germans,  who  seem  less  strange  to  many  of 
us  because  we  have  been  used  to  them  at  home, 
dififer  from  us  totally  in  all  of  the  important 
things. 

Unfortunately  surface  dififerences — as  the 
word  implies — are  the  ones  that  strike  the  eye 
first.  If  beauty  is  only  skin  deep,  so  too  are 
some  of  the  greatest  obstacles  between  peo- 
ples who  were  made  to  understand  each  other. 
French  habits  and  manners  have  their  roots 
in  a  civilisation  so  profoundly  unlike  ours — 
so  much  older,  richer,  more  elaborate  and 
firmly  crystallised — that  French  customs  nec- 
essarily dififer  from  ours  more  than  do  those 
of  more  primitive  races;  and  we  must  dig 
down  to  the  deep  faiths  and  principles  from 
which  every  race  draws  its  enduring  life  to 
find  how  like  in  fundamental  things  are  the 
two  people  whose  destinies  have  been  so 
widely  dififerent. 

To  help  the  American  fresh  from  his  own 
land  to  overcome  these  initial  difficulties,  and 


First  Impressions  17 

to  arrive  at  a  quick  comprehension  of  French 
character,  is  one  of  the  greatest  services  that 
Americans  familiar  with  France  can  render  at 
this  moment.  The  French  cannot  explain 
themselves  fully  to  foreigners,  because  they 
take  for  granted  so  many  things  that  are  as 
unintelligible  to  us  as,  for  instance,  our  eating 
corned-beef  hash  for  breakfast,  or  liking  mus- 
tard with  mutton,  is  to  them.  It  takes  an  out- 
sider familiar  with  both  races  to  explain  away 
what  may  be  called  the  corned-beef-hash  dif- 
ferences, and  bring  out  the  underlying  resem- 
blances; and  while  actual  contact  in  the 
trenches  will  in  the  long  run  do  this  more 
surely  than  any  amount  of  writing,  it  may 
nevertheless  be  an  advantage  to  the  newcomer 
to  arrive  with  a  few  first-aid  hints  in  his  knap- 
sack. 

The  most  interesting  and  profitable  way  of 
studying  the  characteristics  of  a  different  race 
is  to  pick  out,  among  them,  those  in  which 
our  own  national  character  is  most  lacking. 
It  is  sometimes  agreeable,  but  seldom  useful. 


1 8    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

to  do  the  reverse;  that  is,  to  single  out  the 
weak  points  of  the  other  race,  and  brag  of  our 
own  advantages.  This  game,  moreover,  be- 
sides being  unprofitable,  is  also  sometimes 
dangerous.  Before  calling  a  certain  trait  a 
weakness,  and  our  own  opposite  trait  a  superi- 
ority, we  must  be  sure,  as  critics  say,  that  we 
"know  the  context" ;  we  must  be  sure  that  what 
appears  a  defect  in  the  character  of  another 
race  will  not  prove  to  be  a  strength  when 
better  understood. 

Anyhow,  it  is  safer  as  well  as  more  inter- 
esting to  choose  the  obviously  admirable  char- 
acteristics first,  and  especially  those  which 
happen  to  be  more  or  less  lacking  in  our  own 
national  make-up. 

This  is  what  I  propose  to  attempt  in  these 
articles;  and  I  have  singled  out,  as  typically 
"French"  in  the  best  sense  of  that  many-sided 
term,  the  qualities  of  taste,  reverence,  con- 
tinuity, and  intellectual  honesty.  We  are  a 
new  people,  a  pioneer  people,  a  people  des- 
tined by  fate  to  break  up  new  continents  and 


First  Impressions  19 

experiment  in  new  social  conditions;  and 
therefore  it  may  be  useful  to  see  what  part  is 
played  in  the  life  of  p  nation  by  some  of  the 
very  qualities  we  have  had  the  least  time  to 
acquire. 


II 

REVERENCE 

I 

TAKE  care!  Don't  eat  blackberries! 
Don't  you  know  they'll  give  you  the 
fever?" 

Any  American  soldier  w^ho  stops  to  fill  his 
cap  with  the  plump  blackberries  loading  the 
hedgerows  of  France  is  sure  to  receive  this 
warning  from  a  passing  peasant. 

Throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of 
France,  the  most  fruit-loving  and  fruit- 
cultivating  of  countries,  the  same  queer  con- 
viction prevails,  and  year  after  year  the  great 
natural  crop  of  blackberries,  nov/here  better 
and  more  abundant,  is  abandoned  to  birds  and 
insects  because  in  some  remote  and  perhaps 
prehistoric  past  an  ancient  Gaul  once  decreed 
that  "blackberries  give  the  fever." 


Reverence  21 


An  hour  away,  across  the  Channel,  fresh 
blackberries  and  blackberry-jam  form  one  of 
the  staples  of  a  great  ally's  diet;  but  the 
French  have  not  yet  found  out  that  millions 
of  Englishmen  have  eaten  blackberries  for 
generations  without  having  "the  fever." 

Even  if  they  did  find  it  out  they  would 
probably  say:  "The  English  are  different. 
Blackberries  have  always  given  us  the  fever." 
Or  the  more  enlightened  might  ascribe  it  to 
the  climate:  "The  air  may  be  different  in 
England.  Blackberries  may  not  be  unwhole- 
some there,  but  here  they  are  poison." 

There  is  not  the  least  foundation  for  the 
statement,  and  the  few  enterprising  French 
people  who  have  boldly  risked  catching  "the 
fever"  consume  blackberries  in  France  with  as 
much  enjoyment,  and  as  little  harm,  as  their 
English  neighbours.  But  one  could  no  more 
buy  a  blackberry  in  a  French  market  than  one 
could  buy  the  fruit  of  the  nightshade;  the 
one  is  considered  hardly  less  deleterious  than 
the  other. 


22    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

The  prejudice  is  all  the  queerer  because  the 
thrifty,  food-loving  French  peasant  has  dis- 
covered the  innocuousness  of  so  many  dan- 
gerous-looking funguses  that  frighten  the 
Anglo-Saxon  by  their  close  resemblance  to  the 
poisonous  members  of  the  family.  It  takes  a 
practised  eye  to  distinguish  cepes  and  morilles 
from  the  deadly  toadstool ;  whereas  the  black- 
berry resembles  nothing  in  the  world  but  its 
own  luscious  and  innocent  self.  Yet  the  black- 
berry has  been  condemned  untried  because  of 
some  ancient  taboo  that  the  French  peasant 
dares  not  disregard. 

Taboos  of  this  sort  are  as  frequent  in  France 
as  the  blackberries  in  the  hedges,  and  some  of 
them  interfere  with  the  deepest  instincts  of 
the  race. 

Take,  foi  instance,  the  question  of  dinner- 
giving.  Dining  is  a  solemn  rite  to  the  French, 
because  it  offers  the  double  opportunity  of 
good  eating  and  good  talk,  the  two  forms  of 
aesthetic  enjoyment  most  generally  appre- 
ciated.    Everything  connected  with  dinner- 


Reverence  23 


giving  has  an  almost  sacramental  importance 
in  France.  The  quality  of  the  cooking  comes 
first;  but,  once  this  is  assured,  the  hostess'  chief 
concern  is  that  the  quality  of  the  talk  shall 
match  it.  To  attain  this,  the  guests  are  as  care- 
fully chosen  as  boxers  for  a  championship, 
their  number  is  strictly  limited,  and  care  is 
taken  not  to  invite  two  champions  likely  to 
talk  each  other  down. 

The  French,  being  unable  to  live  without 
good  talk,  are  respectful  of  all  the  small  ob- 
servances that  facilitate  it.  Interruption  is 
considered  the  height  of  discourtesy;  but  so  is 
any  attempt,  even  on  the  part  of  the  best  talk- 
ers, to  hold  the  floor  and  prevent  others  from 
making  themselves  heard.  Share  and  share 
alike  is  the  first  rule  of  conversational  polite- 
ness, and  if  a  talker  is  allowed  to  absorb  the 
general  attention  for  more  than  a  few  minutes 
it  is  because  his  conversation  is  known  to  be 
so  good  that  the  other  guests  have  been  invited 
to  listen  to  him.  Even  so,  he  must  give  them 
a  chance  now  and  then,  and  it  is  they  who 


24    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

must  abstain  from  taking  it,  and  must  re- 
peatedly let  him  see  that  for  once  they  are 
content  to  act  as  audience.  Moreover,  even 
the  privileged  talker  is  not  allow^ed  to  dwell 
long  on  any  one  topic,  however  stimulating. 
The  old  lady  who  said  to  her  granddaughter: 
"My  dear,  you  will  soon  learn  that  an  hour  is 
enough  of  anything"  would  have  had  to  re- 
duce her  time-limit  to  five  minutes  if  she  had 
been  formulating  the  rules  of  French  conver- 
sation. 

In  circles  where  interesting  and  entertain- 
ing men  are  habitually  present  the  women  are 
not  expected  to  talk  much.  They  are  not,  of 
course,  to  sit  stupidly  silent,  responsiveness 
is  their  role,  and  they  must  know  how  to  guide 
the  conversation  by  putting  the  right  question 
or  making  the  right  comment.  But  above  all 
they  are  not  to  air  their  views  in  the  presence 
of  men  worth  listening  to.  The  French  care 
passionately  for  ideas,  but  they  do  not  expect 
women  to  have  them,  and  since  they  never 
mistake  erudition  for  intelligence  (as  we  un- 


Reverence  25 


educated  Anglo-Saxons  sometimes  do)  no 
woman  can  force  her  way  into  the  talk  by 
mere  weight  of  book-learning.  She  has  no 
place  there  unless  her  ideas,  and  her  way  of 
expressing  them,  put  her  on  an  equality  with 
the  men;  and  this  seldom  happens.  Women 
(if  they  only  knew  it!,)  are  generally  far  more 
intelligent  listeners  than  talkers;  and  the  rare 
quality  of  the  Frenchwoman's  listening  con- 
tributes not  a  little  to  the  flashing  play  of 
French  talk. 

Here,  then,  is  an  almost  religious  ritual, 
planned  with  the  sole  purpose  of  getting  the 
best  talk  from  the  best  talkers;  but  there  are 
two  malicious  little  taboos  that  delight  in  up- 
setting all  these  preparations. 

One  of  them  seems  incredibly  childish.  It 
is  a  rule  of  French  society  that  host  and 
hostess  shall  sit  exactly  opposite  each  other. 
If  the  number  at  table  is  uneven,  then,  instead 
of  the  guests  being  equally  spaced,  they  will 
be  packed  like  sardines  about  one  half  the 


26    French  Ways,  and  Their  Meaning 

board,  and  left  on  the  other  with  echoing 
straits  between  them  thrown. 

If  the  number  is  such  that,  normally  seated, 
with  men  and  women  alternating,  a  lady 
should  find  herself  opposite  the  hostess,  that 
unthinkable  sacrilege  must  also  be  avoided, 
and  three  women  be  placed  together  on  one 
side  of  the  table,  and  three  men  on  the  other. 
This  means  death  to  general  conversation,  for 
intelligent  women  will  never  talk  together 
when  they  can  talk  to  men,  or  even  listen  to 
them;  so  that  the  party,  thus  disarranged,  re- 
sembles that  depressing  dish,  a  pudding  in 
which  all  the  plums  have  run  into  one  corner. 

The  plums  do  not  like  it  either.  The  scat- 
tered affinities  grope  for  each  other  and  vainly 
seek  to  reconstitute  a  normal  pudding.  The 
attempt  is  always  a  failure,  and  the  French 
hostess  knows  it;  yet  many  delightful  dinners 
are  wrecked  on  the  unrelenting  taboo  that 
obliges  host  and  hostess  to  sit  exactly  opposite 
each  other. 

"Precedence"  is  another  obstacle  to  the  real- 


Reverence  27 


isation  of  the  perfect  dinner.  Precedence  in 
a  republic — !  It  is  acknowledged  to  be  an 
absurd  anomaly  except  where  official  rank  is 
concerned;  and  though  its  defenders  argue 
that  it  is  a  short-cut  through  many  problems 
of  vanity  and  amour-propre  it  might  certainly 
be  disregarded  to  the  general  advantage  when- 
ever a  few  intelligent  people  have  been 
brought  together,  not  to  compare  their  titles 
but  to  forget  them. 

But  there  it  is.  The  French  believe  them- 
selves to  be  the  most  democratic  people  in  the 
world — and  they  have  some  of  the  democratic 
instincts,  though  not  as  many  as  they  think. 
But  an  Academician  must  sit  on  his  hostess' 
right,  unless  there  is  a  Duke  or  an  Ambassa- 
dor or  a  Bishop  present;  and  these  rules, 
comic  enough  where  peer  meets  prelate,  be- 
come more  humorous  (and  also  grow  more 
strict)  when  applied  to  the  imperceptible  dif- 
ferences between  the  lower  degrees  of  the  im- 
mense professional  and  governmental  hier- 
archy. 


28    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

But  again — there  it  is.  A  hostess  whose 
papa  helped  to  blow  up  the  Tuileries  or  pull 
down  the  Vendome  column  weighs  the  rela- 
tive claims  of  two  Academicians  (always  a 
bad  stumbling  block)  as  carefully  as  a  duchess 
of  the  old  regime,  brought  up  to  believe  in  the 
divine  right  of  Kings,  scrutinises  the  gene- 
alogy of  her  guests  before  seating  them.  And 
this  strict  observance  of  rules  is  not  due  to 
snobbishness;  the  French  are  not  a  snobbish 
people.  It  is  part  of  les  bienseances,  of  the 
always-have-beens ;  and  there  is  a  big  bullying 
taboo  in  the  way  of  changing  it. 

In  England,  where  precedence  has,  at  any 
rate,  the  support  of  a  court,  where  it  is,  so  to 
speak,  still  a  'Agoing  concern,"  and  works  au- 
tomatically, the  hostess,  if  she  is  a  woman  of 
the  world,  casts  it  to  the  winds  on  informal  oc- 
casions; but  in  France  there  is  no  democratic 
dinner-table  over  which  it  does  not  perma- 
nently hang  its  pall. 


Reverence  29 


II 

It  may  seem  curious  to  have  chosen  the  in- 
stance of  the  blackberry  as  the  text  of  a  homily 
on  "Reverence."  Why  not  have  substituted  as 
a  title  "Prejudice" — or  simply  "Stupidity"? 

Well — "Prejudice"  and  "Reverence,"  of- 
tener  than  one  thinks,  are  overlapping  terms, 
and  it  seems  fairer  to  choose  the  one  of  the  two 
that  is  not  what  the  French  call  "pejorative." 
As  for  "Stupidity" — it  must  be  remembered 
that  the  French  peasant  thinks  it  incredibly 
stupid  of  us  not  instantly  to  distinguish  a 
mushroom  from  a  toadstool,  or  any  of  the  in- 
termediate forms  of  edible  funguses  from 
their  death-dealing  cousins!  Remember  that 
we  Americans  deprive  ourselves  of  many  de- 
licious dishes,  and  occasionally  hurry  whole 
harmless  families  to  the  grave,  through  not 
taking  the  trouble  to  examine  and  compare 
the  small  number  of  mushrooms  at  our  dis- 
posal; while  the  French  avoid  blackberries 
from  a  deep  and  awesome  conviction  handed 
down  from  the  night  of  history. 


30    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

There  is  the  key  to  my  apologue.  The 
French  fear  of  the  blackberry  is  not  due  to 
any  lack  of  curiosity  about  its  qualities,  but  to 
respect  for  some  ancient  sanction  which  pre- 
vents those  qualities  from  being  investigated. 

There  is  a  reflex  of  negation,  of  rejection, 
at  the  very  root  of  the  French  character:  an 
instinctive  recoil  from  the  new,  the  untasted, 
the  untested,  like  the  retracting  of  an  insect's 
feelers  at  contact  with  an  unfamiliar  object; 
and  no  one  can  hope  to  understand  the  French 
without  bearing  in  mind  that  this  unquestion- 
ing respect  for  rules  of  which  the  meaning  is 
forgotten  acts  as  a  perpetual  necessary  check 
to  the  idol-breaking  instinct  of  the  freest 
minds  in  the  world. 

It  may  sound  like  a  poor  paradox  to  say 
that  the  French  are  traditional  about  small 
things  because  they  are  so  free  about  big  ones. 
But  the  history  of  human  societies  seems  to 
show  that  if  they  are  to  endure  they  must 
unconsciously  secrete  the  corrective  of  their 
own  highest  qualities. 


Reverence  31 


"Reverence"  may  be  the  wasteful  fear  of  an 
old  taboo;  but  it  is  also  the  sense  of  the  pre- 
ciousness  of  long  accumulations  of  experience. 
The  quintessential  is  precious  because  what- 
ever survives  the  close  filtering  of  time  is 
likely  to  answer  to  some  deep  racial  need, 
moral  or  aesthetic.  It  is  stupid  to  deprive 
one's  self  of  blackberries  for  a  reason  one  has 
forgotten ;  but  what  should  we  say  of  a  people 
who  had  torn  down  their  cathedrals  when 
they  ceased  to  feel  the  beauty  of  Gothic  archi- 
tecture, as  the  French  had  ceased  to  feel  it  in 
the  seventeenth  century? 

The  instinct  to  preserve  that  which  has  been 
slow  and  difficult  in  the  making,  that  into 
which  the  long  associations  of  the  past  are 
woven,  is  a  more  constant  element  of  pro- 
gress than  the  Huguenot's  idol-breaking 
hammer. 

Reverence  and  irreverence  are  both  needed 
to  help  the  world  along,  and  each  is  most 
needed  where  the  other  most  naturally 
abounds. 


32    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

In  this  respect  France  and  America  are  in 
the  same  case.  America,  because  of  her  ori- 
gin, tends  to  irreverence,  impatience,  to  all 
sorts  of  rash  and  contemptuous  short-cuts; 
France,  for  the  same  reason,  to  routine,  prece- 
dent, tradition,  the  beaten  path.  Therefore  it 
ought  to  help  each  nation  to  apply  to  herself 
the  corrective  of  the  other's  example;  and 
America  can  profit  more  by  seeking  to  find  out 
why  France  is  reverent,  and  what  she  reveres, 
than  by  trying  to  inoculate  her  with  a  flippant 
disregard  of  her  own  past. 

The  first  thing  to  do  is  to  try  to  find  out 
why  a  people,  so  free  and  active  of  thought  as 
the  French,  are  so  subject  to  traditions  that 
have  lost  their  meaning. 

The  fundamental  cause  is  probably  geo- 
graphical. We  Americans  have  hitherto  been 
geographically  self-contained,  and  until  this 
war  did  away  with  distances  we  were  free  to 
try  any  social  and  political  experiments  we 
pleased,  without,  at  any  rate,  weakening  our- 
selves in  relation  to  our  neighbours.    To  keep 


Reverence  33 


them  off  we  did  not  even  have  to  have  an 
army  I 

France,  on  the  contrary,  has  had  to  fight 
for  her  existence  ever  since  she  has  had  any. 
Of  her,  more  than  of  any  other  great  modern 
nation,  it  may  be  said  that  from  the  start  she 
has  had,  as  Goethe  puts  it,  to  "reconquer  each 
day  the  liberty  won  the  day  before." 

Again  and  again,  in  the  past,  she  has  seen 
her  territory  invaded,  her  monuments  de- 
stroyed, her  institutions  shattered;  the  ground 
on  which  the  future  of  the  world  is  now  being 
fought  for  is  literally  the  same  as  that  Cata- 
launian  plain  (the  ''Camp  de  Chalons")  on 
which  Attila  tried  to  strangle  France  over 
fourteen  hundred  years  ago.  "In  the  year 
450  all  Gaul  was  filled  with  terror;  for  the 
dreaded  Attila,  with  a  host  of  strange  figures, 
Fluns,  Tartars,  Teutons,  head  of  an  empire 
of  true  barbarians,  drew  near  her  borders. 
Barbarism  .  .  .  now  threatened  the  world. 
It  had  levied  a  shameful  tribute  on  Constanti- 
nople; it  now  threatened  the  farthest  West. 


34    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

If  Gaul  fell,  Spain  would  fall,  and  Italy, 
and  Rome;  and  Attila  would  reign  supreme, 
with  an  empire  of  desolation,  over  the  whole 
world."* 

"The  whole  world"  is  a  bigger  place  now- 
adays, and  "farthest  West"  is  at  the  Golden 
Gate  and  not  at  the  Pillars  of  Hercules;  but 
otherwise  might  we  not  be  reading  a  leader  in 
yesterday's  paper? 

Try  to  picture  life  under  such  continual 
menace  of  death,  and  see  how  in  an  indus- 
trious, intelligent  and  beauty-loving  race  it 
must  inevitably  produce  two  strong  passions: 

Pious  love  of  every  yard  of  the  soil  and 
every  stone  of  the  houses. 

Intense  dread  lest  any  internal  innovations 
should  weaken  the  social  structure  and  open  a 
door  to  the  enemy. 

There  is  nothing  like  a  Revolution  for  mak- 
ing people  conservative;  that  is  one  of  the  rea- 
sons why,  for  instance,  our  Constitution,  the 
child  of  Revolution,  is  the  most  conservative 

*Kitchin:    "History    of    France,"    vol.    I. 


Reverence  35 


in  history.  But,  in  other  respects,  why  should 
we  Americans  be  conservative?  To  begin 
with,  there  is  not  much  as  yet  for  us  to  "con- 
serve" except  a  few  root-principles  of  con- 
duct, social  and  political;  and  see  how  they 
spring  up  and  dominate  every  other  interest 
in  each  national  crisis  I 

In  France  it  is  different.  The  French  have 
nearly  two  thousand  years  of  history  and  art 
and  industry  and  social  and  political  life  to 
"conserve" ;  that  is  another  of  the  reasons  why 
their  intense  intellectual  curiosity,  their  per- 
petual desire  for  the  new  thing,  is  counteracted 
by  a  clinging  to  rules  and  precedents  that  have 
often  become  meaningless. 

Ill 

Reverence  is  the  life-belt  of  those  whose 
home  is  on  a  raft,  and  Americans  have  not 
pored  over  the  map  of  France  for  the  last  four 
years  without  discovering  that  she  may  fairly 
be  called  a  raft.  But  geographical  necessity  is 
far  from  being  the  only  justification  of  rever- 


36    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ence.  It  is  not  chiefly  because  the  new  meth- 
ods of  warfare  lay  America  open  to  the  same 
menace  as  continental  Europe  that  it  is  good 
for  us  to  consider  the  meaning  of  this  ancient 
principle  of  civilised  societies. 

We  are  growing  up  at  last;  and  it  is  only 
in  maturity  that  a  man  glances  back  along 
the  past,  and  sees  the  use  of  the  constraints 
that  irritated  his  impatient  youth.  So  with 
races  and  nations;  and  America  has  reached 
the  very  moment  in  her  development  when  she 
may  best  understand  what  has  kept  older  races 
and  riper  civilisations  sound. 

Reverence  is  one  of  these  preserving  ele- 
ments, and  it  is  worth  while  to  study  it  in  its 
action  in  French  life.  If  geographical  neces- 
sity is  the  fundamental  cause,  another,  almost 
as  deep-seated,  is  to  be  found  in  the  instinct 
of  every  people  to  value  and  preserve  what 
they  have  themselves  created  and  made  beau- 
tiful. 

In  Selden's  "Table-talk"  there  is  told  the 
story  of  a  certain  carver  of  idols.     Being  a 


Reverence  37 


pious  man  he  had  always  worshipped  his  own 
idols  till  he  was  suddenly  called  upon  to  make 
one  in  great  haste,  and,  no  other  wood  being 
available,  had  to  cut  down  the  plum-tree  in 
his  own  garden  and  make  the  image  out  of 
that. 

He  could  not  worship  the  plum-tree  idol, 
because  he  knew  too  much  about  the  plum- 
tree.  That,  at  least,  is  Selden's  version;  but 
how  little  insight  it  shows  into  human  pro- 
cesses! Of  course,  after  a  time,  the  carver 
came  to  worship  the  plum-tree  idol,  and  to 
worship  it  just  because  he  had  grown  the 
tree  and  carved  the  image,  and  it  was  there- 
fore doubly  of  his  making.  That  is  the  very 
key  to  the  secret  of  reverence;  the  tenderness 
we  feel  for  our  own  effort  extending  to  re- 
spect for  all  fine  human  effort. 

America  is  already  showing  this  instinct 
in  her  eagerness  to  beautify  her  towns,  and  to 
preserve  her  few  pre-Revolutionary  buildings 
— that  small  fragment  of  her  mighty  Euro- 
pean heritage. 


38    French  Ways  am)  Their  Meaning 


But  there  are  whole  stretches  of  this  heri- 
tage that  have  been  too  long  allowed  to  run  to 
waste:  our  language,  our  literature,  and  many 
other  things  pertaining  to  the  great  undefin- 
able  domain  of  Taste. 

A  man  who  owns  a  vast  field  does  not  care 
for  that  field  half  as  much  when  it  is  a  waste 
as  after  he  has  sweated  over  its  furrows  and 
seen  the  seeds  spring.  And  when  he  has 
turned  a  bit  of  it  into  a  useless  bright  flower- 
garden  he  cares  for  that  useless  bit  best  of  all. 

The  deeper  civilisation  of  a  country  may 
to  a  great  extent  be  measured  by  the  care  she 
gives  to  her  flower-garden — the  corner  of  her 
life  where  the  supposedly  ''useless"  arts  and 
graces  flourish.  In  the  cultivating  of  that 
garden  France  has  surpassed  all  modern  na- 
tions; and  one  of  the  greatest  of  America's 
present  opportunities  is  to  find  out  why. 


Ill 

TASTE 


FRENCH  taste?  Why,  of  course— ev- 
erybody knows  all  about  that!  It's 
the  way  the  women  put  on  their  hats, 
and  the  upholsterers  drape  their  curtains. 

Certainly — why  not? 

The  artistic  integrity  of  the  French  has  led 
them  to  feel  from  the  beginning  that  there  is 
no  difference  in  kind  between  the  curve  of  a 
woman's  hat-brim  and  the  curve  of  a  Rodin 
marble,  or  between  the  droop  of  an  uphol- 
sterer's curtain  and  that  of  the  branches  along 
a  great  avenue  laid  out  by  Le  Notre. 

It  was  the  Puritan  races — every  one  of  them 
non-creative  in  the  plastic  arts— who  decided 
that  "Art"  (that  is,  plastic  art)  was  some- 
thing apart  from  life,  as  dangerous  to  it  as 

39 


40    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

Plato  thought  Poets  in  a  Republic,  and  to  be 
tolerated  only  when  it  was  so  lofty,  unap- 
proachable and  remote  from  any  appeal  to 
average  humanity  that  it  bored  people  to 
death,  and  they  locked  it  up  in  Museums  to 
get  rid  of  it. 

But  this  article  is  headed  "Taste,"  and  taste, 
whatever  it  may  be,  is  not,  after  all,  the  same 
thing  as  art.  No;  it  is  not  art — but  it  is  the 
atmosphere  in  which  art  lives,  and  outside  of 
which  it  cannot  live.  It  is  the  regulating  prin- 
ciple of  all  art,  of  the  art  of  dress  and  of 
manners,  and  of  living  in  general,  as  well  as 
of  sculpture  or  music.  It  is  because  the 
French  have  always  been  so  innately  sure  of 
this,  that,  without  burdening  themselves  with 
formulas,  they  have  instinctively  applied  to 
living  the  same  rules  that  they  applied  to  ar- 
tistic creation. 

II 

I  remember  being  told  when  I  was  a  young 
girl:  "If  you  want  to  interest  the  person  you 


Taste  41 

are  talking  to,  pitch  your  voice  so  that  only 
that  one  person  will  hear  you." 

That  small  axiom,  apart  from  its  obvious 
application,  contains  nearly  all  there  is  to  say 
about  Taste. 

That  a  thing  should  be  in  scale — should  be 
proportioned  to  its.  purpose — is  one  of  the 
first  requirements  of  beaut>,  in  whatever  or- 
der. No  shouting  where  an  undertone  will 
do;  and  no  gigantic  Statue  of  Liberty  in  but- 
ter for  a  World's  Fair,  when  the  little  Wing- 
less Victory,  tying  on  her  sandal  on  the  Acrop- 
olis, holds  the  whole  horizon  in  the  curve  of 
her  slim  arm. 

The  essence  of  taste  is  suitability.  Divest 
the  woid  of  its  prim  and  priggish  implica- 
tions, and  see  how  it  expresses  the  mysterious 
demand  of  eye  and  mind  for  symmetry,  har- 
mony and  order. 

Suitability — fitness — is,  and  always  has 
been,  the  very  foundation  of  French  stand- 
ards. Fitness  is  only  a  contraction  of  fitting- 
ness;  and  if  any  of  our  American  soldiers  in 


42    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

France  should  pause  to  look  up  at  the  narrow 
niches  in  the  portal  of  a  French  cathedral,  or 
at  the  group  of  holy  figures  in  the  triangle  or 
half-circle  above,  they  are  likely  to  be  struck 
first  of  all  by  the  way  in  which  the  attitude 
of  each  figure  or  group  is  adapted  to  the  space 
it  fills. 

If  the  figure  is  cramped  and  uncomfortable 
— if  the  saint  or  angel  seems  to  be  in  a  strait- 
jacket  or  a  padded  cell — then  the  sculptor 
has  failed,  and  taste  is  offended.  It  is  essen- 
tial that  there  should  be  perfect  harmony  be- 
tween the  natural  attitude  of  the  figure  and 
the  space  it  lives  in — that  a  square  saint  should 
not  be  put  in  a  round  hole.  Range  through 
plastic  art,  from  Chaldaea  to  France,  and  you 
will  see  how  this  principle  of  adaptation  has 
always   ruled  composition. 

Ill 

It  is  the  sense  of  its  universal  applicability 
that  makes  taste  so  living  an  influence  in 
France.     French  people  "have  taste"  as  nat- 


Taste  43 

urally  as  they  breathe:  it  is  not  regarded  as 
an  accomplishment,  like  playing  the  flute. 

The  universal  existence  of  taste,  and  of  the 
standard  it  creates— it  insists  on — explains 
many  of  the  things  that  strike  Americans  on 
first  arriving  in  France. 

It  is  the  reason,-  for  instance,  v^hy  the 
French  have  beautiful  stone  quays  along  the 
great  rivers  on  which  their  cities  are  built, 
and  w^hy  noble  monuments  of  architecture, 
and  gardens  and  terraces,  have  been  built 
along  these  quays.  The  French  have  always 
felt  and  reverenced  the  beauty  of  their  rivers, 
and  known  the  value,  artistic  and  hygienic,  of 
a  beautiful  and  well-kept  river-front  in  the 
heart  of  a  crowded  city. 

When  industrialism  began  its  work  of  dis- 
figurement in  the  great  cities  of  the  world, 
long  reaches  of  the  Thames  were  seized  upon 
by  the  factory-builder,  and  London  has  only 
by  a  recent  effort  saved  a  short  stretch  of  her 
river  front;  even  so,  from  the  Embankment, 


44    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

whether  at  Westminster  or  Chelsea,  one  looks 
across  at  ugliness,  untidiness  and  squalor. 

When  industrialism  came  to  the  wise  old 
Latin  cities — Paris,  Lyons,  Bordeaux,  Flor- 
ence— their  river  banks  were  already  firmly 
and  beautifully  built  up,  and  the  factory- 
chimneys  had  to  find  a  footing  in  the  outskirts. 
Any  American  with  eyes  to  see,  who  compares 
the  architectural  use  to  which  Paris  has  put 
the  Seine  with  the  wasteful  degradation  of 
the  unrivalled  twin  river-fronts  of  New  York, 
may  draw  his  own  conclusions  as  to  the  sheer 
material  advantage  of  taste  in  the  creation  of 
a  great  city. 

Perhaps  the  most  curious  instance  of  taste- 
blindness  in  dealing  with  such  an  opportunity 
is  to  be  found  in  Boston,  where  Beacon  Street 
calmly  turned  its  wealthy  back  to  the  bay, 
and  fringed  with  clothes-lines  the  shores  that 
might  have  made  of  Boston  one  of  the  most 
beautifully  situated  cities  in  the  world.  In 
this  case,  industry  did  not  encroach  or  slums 
degrade.      The    Boston    aristocracy    appro- 


Taste  4c; 

priated  the  shore  of  the  bay  for  its  own  resi- 
dential uses,  but  apparently  failed  to  notice 
that  the  bay  was  there. 

Taste,  also — the  recognition  of  a  standard 
— explains  the  existence  of  such  really  na- 
tional institutions  as  the  French  Academy,  and 
the  French  national  theatre,  the  Theatre  Fran- 
^ais.  The  history  of  the  former,  in  particular, 
throws  a  light  on  much  that  is  most  distinc- 
tively French  in  the  French  character. 

It  would  be  difficult  for  any  one  walking 
along  the  Quai  Malaquais,  and  not  totally 
blind  to  architectural  beauty,  not  to  be 
charmed  by  the  harmony  of  proportion  and 
beauty  of  composition  of  a  certain  building 
with  curved  wings  and  a  small  central  dome 
that  looks  across  the  Seine  at  the  gardens  of 
the  Louvre  and  the  spires  of  Saint  Germain 
I'Auxerrois. 

That  building,  all  elegance,  measure  and 
balance,  from  its  graceful  cupola  to  the  stately 
stone  vases  surmounting  the  lateral  colonnades 
' — that  building  is  the  old  ''College  des  Quatre 


46    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

'  ■   ■    '  ■■'■  -'  '  — ■ — ^ — • 

Nations,"  the  Institute  of  France,  and  the 
home  of  the  French  Academy. 

In  1635,  at  a  time  when  France  was  still 
struggling  with  the  heavy  inheritance  of  feu* 
dalism,  a  bad  man  and  great  statesman,  the 
mighty  Cardinal  Richelieu,  paused  in  his  long 
fight  with  the  rebellious  vassals  of  the  crown 
to  create  a  standard  of  French  speech:  "To 
establish  the  rules  of  the  language,  and  make 
French  not  only  elegant,  but  capable  of  deal- 
ing with  the  arts  and  sciences." 

Think  of  the  significance  of  such  an  act  at 
such  a  moment!  France  was  a  welter  of  polit- 
ical and  religious  dissension;  everything  in 
the  monarchy,  and  the  monarchy  itself,  was  in 
a  state  of  instability.  Austria  and  Spain 
menaced  it  from  without,  the  great  vassals 
tore  it  asunder  from  within.  During  the 
Great  Assizes  of  Auvergne  some  of  the  most 
powerful  of  these  nobles  were  tried,  punished 
and  stripped  of  their  monstrous  privileges; 
and  the  record  of  their  misdeeds  reads  like  a 


Taste  47 

tale  of  Sicilian  brigandage  and  Corsican  ven- 
detta. 

Gradually  the  iron  hand  of  Richelieu  drew 
order — a  grim  pitiless  order — out  of  this  unin- 
habitable chaos.  But  it  was  in  the  very  thick 
of  the  conflict  that  he  seemed  to  feel  the  need 
of  creating,  then  and  there,  some  fixed  princi- 
ple of  civilised  life,  some  kind  of  ark  in  which 
thought  and  taste  and  "civility"  could  take 
shelter.  It  wab  as  if,  in  the  general  upheaval, 
he  wished  to  give  stability  to  the  things  which 
humanise  and  unite  society.  And  he  chose 
"taste" — taste  in  speech,  in  culture,  in  man- 
ners,— as  the  fusing  principle  of  his  new 
Academy, 

The  traditional  point  of  view  of  its  founder 
has  been  faithfully  observed  for  nearly  three 
hundred  years  by  the  so-called  "Forty  Im- 
mortals," the  Academicians  who  throne  under 
the  famous  cupola.  The  Academy  has  never 
shrunk  into  a  mere  retreat  for  lettered  pedan- 
try: as  M.  Saillens  says  in  his  admirable  little 
book,  "Facts  about  France":  "The  great  ob- 


48    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ject  of  Richelieu  was  national  unity,"  and 
"The  Forty  do  not  believe  that  they  can  keep 
the  language  under  discipline  by  merely  pub- 
lishing a  Dictionary  now  and  then  (the  first 
edition  came  out  in  1694).  They  believe  that 
a  standard  must  be  set,  and  that  it  is  for  them 
to  set  it.  Therefore  the  Academy  does  not 
simply  call  to  its  ranks  famous  or  careful 
writers,  but  soldiers  as  well,  bishops,  scien- 
tists, men  of  the  world,  men  of  social  rank,  so 
as  to  maintain  from  generation  to  generation  a 
national  conservatory  of  good  manners  and 
good  speech." 

For  this  reason,  though  Frenchmen  have 
always  laughed  at  their  Academy,  they  have 
always  respected  it,  and  aspired  to  the  distinc- 
tion of  membership.  Even  the  rebellious 
spirits  who  satirise  it  in  their  youth  usually 
become,  in  maturity,  almost  too  eager  for  its 
recognition;  and,  though  the  fact  of  being  an 
Academician  gives  social  importance,  it 
would  be  absurd  to  pretend  that  such  men  as 
Pasteur,    Henri    Poincare,    Marshal    Jofifre, 


Taste  49 

sought  the  distinction  for  that  reason,  or  that 
France  would  have  thought  it  worthy  of  their 
seeking  if  the  institution  had  not  preserved 
its  original  significance. 

That  significance  was  simply  the  safe- 
guarding of  what  the  French  call  les  choses 
de  V esprit;  which  cannot  quite  be  translated 
"things  of  the  spirit,"  and  yet  means  more 
nearly  that  than  anything  else.  And  Riche- 
lieu and  the  original  members  of  the  Acad- 
emy had  recognised  from  the  first  day  that 
language  was  the  chosen  vessel  in  which  the 
finer  life  of  a  nation  must  be  preserved. 

It  is  not  uncommon  nowadays,  especially  in 
America,  to  sneer  at  any  deliberate  attempts 
to  stabilise  language.  To  test  such  criticisms  It 
Is*  useful  to  reduce  them  to  their  last  conse- 
quence— which  is  alm^ost  always  absurdity.  It 
Is  not  difficult  to  discover  what  becomes  of  a 
language  left  to  itself,  without  accepted 
standards  or  restrictions;  Instances  may  be 
found  among  any  savage  tribes  without  fixed 
standards  of  speech.    Their  language  speedily 


50    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ceases  to  be  one,  and  deteriorates  into  a  mud- 
dle of  unstable  dialects.  Or,  if  an  instance 
nearer  home  is  needed,  the  lover  of  English 
need  only  note  what  that  rich  language  has 
shrunk  to  on  the  lips,  and  in  the  literature,  of 
the  heterogeneous  hundred  millions  of  Ameri- 
can citizens  who,  without  uniformity  of  tra- 
dition or  recognised  guidance,  are  being  suf- 
fered to  work  their  many  wills  upon  it. 

But  at  this  point  it  may  be  objected  that, 
after  all,  England  herself  has  never  had  an 
Academy,  nor  could  ever  conceivably  have 
had  one,  and  that  whatever  the  English  of 
America  has  become,  the  English  of  England 
is  still  the  language  of  her  great  tradition, 
with  perfectly  defined  standards  of  taste  and 
propriety. 

England  is  England,  as  France  is  France: 
the  one  feels  the  need  of  defining  what  the 
other  finds  it  simpler  to  take  for  granted. 
England  has  never  had  a  written  Constitu- 
tion; yet  her  constitutional  government  has 
long  been  the  model  of  free  nations.     Eng- 


Taste  51 

land's  standards  are  all  implicit.  She  does 
not  feel  the  French  need  of  formulating  and 
tabulating.  Her  Academy  is  not  built  with 
hands,  but  it  is  just  as  powerful,  and  just  as 
visible  to  those  who  have  eyes  to  see;  and 
the  name  of  the  English  Academy  is  Usage. 

IV 

I  said  just  now:  "If  any  of  our  American 
soldiers  look  up  at  the  niches  in  the  portal 
of  a  French  cathedral  they  are  likely  to  be 
struck  first  of  all  by"  such  and  such  things. 

In  our  new  Army  all  the  arts  and  profes- 
sions are  represented,  and  if  the  soldier  in 
question  happens  to  be  a  sculptor,  an  archi- 
tect, or  an  art  critic,  he  will  certainly  note 
what  I  have  pointed  out;  but  if  he  is  not  a 
trained  observer,  the  chances  are  that  he  will 
not  even  look  up. 

The  difference  is  that  in  France  almost  ev- 
ery one  has  the  seeing  eye,  just  as  almost  every 
one  has  the  hearing  ear.  It  is  not  a  platitude, 
though  it  may  be  a  truism,  to  say  that  the 


52    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

French  are  a  race  of  artists :  it  is  the  key  that 
unlocks  every  door  of  their  complex  pyschol- 
ogy,  and  consequently  the  key  that  must  be 
oftenest  in  the  explorer's  hand. 

The  gift  of  the  seeing  eye  is,  obviously,  a 
first  requisite  where  taste  is  to  prevail.  And 
the  question  is,  how  is  the  seeing  eye  to  be  ob- 
tained? What  is  the  operation  for  taste- 
blindness?  Or  is  there  any;  and  are  not  some 
races — the  artistically  non-creative — born  as 
irremediably  blind  as  Kentucky  cave-fishes? 

The  answer  might  be  yes,  in  the  case  of 
the  wholly  non-creative  races.  But  the  men 
of  English  blood  are  creative  artists  too; 
theirs  is  the  incomparable  gift  of  poetic  ex- 
pression. And  any  race  gifted  with  one  form 
of  artistic  originality  is  always  acutely  appre- 
ciative of  other  cognate  forms  of  expression. 
There  has  never  been  a  race  more  capable 
than  the  English  of  appreciating  the  great 
plastic  creators,  Greece,  Italy  and  France. 
This  gift  of  the  critical  sense  in  those  arts; 
wherein  the  race  does  not  excel  in  original  ex- 


Taste  153 

pression  seems  an  inevitable  by-product  of  its 
own  special  endowment.  In  such  races  taste- 
blindness  is  purely  accidental,  and  the  opera- 
tion that  cures  it  is  the  long  slow  old-fash- 
ioned one  of  education.     There  is  no  other. 

The  artist  races  are  naturally  less  dependent 
on  education:  to  a  certain  degree  their  in- 
stinct takes  the  place  of  acquired  discrimina- 
tion. But  they  set  a  greater  store  on  it  than 
any  other  races  because  they  appreciate  more 
than  the  others  all  that,  even  to  themselves, 
education  reveals  and  develops. 

It  is  just  because  the  French  are  naturally 
endowed  with  taste  that  they  attach  such  im- 
portance to  cultivation,  and  that  French  stand- 
ards of  education  are  so  infinitely  higher  and 
more  severe  than  those  existing  in  Anglo- 
Saxon  countries.  We  are  too  much  inclined 
to  think  that  we  have  disposed  of  the  matter 
when  we  say  that,  in  our  conception  of  life, 
education  should  be  formative  and  not  in- 
structive. The  point  is,  the  French  might  re- 
turn, what  are  we  to  be  formed  for?    And,  in 


54    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

any  case,  they  would  not  recognise  the  an- 
tithesis, since  they  believe  that,  to  form,  one 
must  instruct:  instruct  the  eye,  the  ear,  the 
brain,  every  one  of  those  marvellous  organs  of 
sense  so  often  left  dormant  by  our  Anglo- 
Saxon  training. 

It  used  to  be  thought  that  if  savages  ap- 
peared unimpressed  by  the  w^onders  of  occi- 
dental art  or  industry  it  w^as  because  their 
natural  hauteur  would  not  let  them  betray 
surprise  to  the  intruder.  That  romantic  illu- 
sion has  been  dispelled  by  modern  investiga- 
tion, and  the  traveller  now  knows  that  the  sav- 
age is  unimpressed  because  he  does  not  see  the 
new  things  presented  to  him.  It  takes  the 
most  complex  assemblage  of  associations, 
visual  and  mental,  to  enable  us  to  discover 
what  a  picture  represents:  the  savage  placed 
before  such  familiar  examples  of  the  graphic 
art  as  "The  Infant  Samuel"  or  "His  Master's 
Voice"  would  not  see  the  infant  or  the  fox- 
terrier,  much  less  guess  what  they  were  sup- 
posed to  be  doing. 


Taste  <?«; 

As  long  as  America  believes  in  short-cuts 
to  knowledge,  in  any  possibility  of  buying 
taste  in  tabloids,  she  will  never  come  into  her 
real  inheritance  of  English  culture.  A  gen- 
tleman travelling  in  the  Middle  West  met  a 
charming  girl  who  was  a  "college  graduate." 
He  asked  her  what  line  of  study  she  had  se- 
lected, and  she  replied  that  she  had  learnt 
music  one  year,  and  languages  the  next,  and 
that  last  year  she  had  "learnt  art." 

It  is  the  pernicious  habit  of  regarding  the 
arts  as  something  that  can  be  bottled,  pickled 
and  absorbed  in  twelve  months  (thanks  to 
"courses,"  summaries  and  abridgments)  that 
prevents  the  development  of  a  real  artistic  sen- 
sibilit\"  in  our  eager  and  richly  endowed  race. 
Patience,  deliberateness.  reverence:  these  are 
the  fundamental  elements  of  taste.  The 
French  have  always  cultivated  them,  and  it  is 
as  much  to  them  as  to  the  eagle-tlights  of 
genius  that  France  owes  her  long  artistic  su- 
premacy. 

From  tlie  Middle  Aires  to  the  Revolution 


56    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

all  the  French  trade-guilds  had  their  travel- 
ling members,  the  "Compagnons  du  Tour  de 
France."  Not  for  greed  of  gold,  but  simply 
from  the  ambition  to  excel  in  their  own  craft, 
these  "companions,"  their  trade  once  learned, 
took  their  staves  in  hand,  and  wandered  on 
foot  over  France,  going  from  one  to  another 
of  the  cities  where  the  best  teachers  of  their 
special  trades  were  to  be  found,  and  serving 
an  apprenticeship  in  each  till  they  learned 
enough  to  surpass  their  masters.  The  "tour 
de  France"  was  France's  old  way  of  acquiring 
"Efficiency";  and  even  now  she  does  not  be- 
lieve it  can  be  found  in  newspaper  nostrums. 


\ 


IV 

INTELLECTUAL  HONESTY 

I 

MOST  people,  in  their  infancy,  have 
made  bogeys  out  of  sofa-pillows 
and  overcoats,  and  the  imaginative 
child  always  comes  to  believe  in  the  reality 
of  the  bogey  he  has  manufactured,  and  to- 
ward twilight  grows  actually  afraid  of  it. 

When  I  was  a  little  girl  the  name  of  Horace 
Greeley  was  potent  in  American  politics,  and 
some  irreverent  tradesman  had  manufactured 
a  pink  cardboard  fan  (on  the  "palmetto"  mod- 
el) which  represented  the  countenance  of 
the  venerable  demagogue,  and  was  sur- 
rounded with  a  white  silk  fringe  in  imitation 
of  his  hoary  hair  and  "chin-beard."  A 
Horace  Greeley  fan  had  long  been  knocking 
about  our  country-house,  and  was  a  familiar 
object  to  me  and  to  my  little  cousins,  w^hen 

57 


58    -French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

one  day  it  occurred  to  us  to  make  a  bogey 
with  my  father's  overcoat,  put  Mr.  Greeley's 
head  on  top,  and  seat  him  on  the  verandah 
near  the  front  door. 

When  we  were  tired  of  playing  we  started 
to  go  in;  but  there  on  the  threshold  in  the 
dusk  sat  Mr.  Greeley,  suddenly  transformed 
into  an  animate  and  unknown  creature,  and 
dumb  terror  rooted  us  to  the  spot.  Not  one 
of  us  had  the  courage  to  demolish  that  super- 
natural and  malevolent  old  man,  or  to  dash 
past  him  into  the  house — and  oh,  the  relief  it 
was  when  a  big  brother  came  along  and  re- 
duced him  into  his  constituent  parts! 

Such  inhibitions  take  the  imagination  far 
back  to  the  childhood  of  the  human  race, 
when  terrors  and  taboos  lurked  in  every  bush; 
and  wherever  the  fear  of  the  thing  it  has 
created  survives  in  the  mind  of  any  society, 
that  society  is  still  in  its  childhood.  Intellec- 
tual honesty,  the  courage  to  look  at  things  as 
they  are,  is  the  first  test  of  mental  maturity. 
Till  a  society  ceases  to  be  afraid  of  the  truth  in 


Intellectual  Honesty  159 

the  domain  of  ideas  it  is  in  leading-strings, 
morally  and  mentally. 

The  singular  superiority  of  the  French  has 
always  lain  in  their  intellectual  courage. 
Other  races  and  nations  have  been  equally  dis- 
tinguished for  moral  courage,  but  too  often  it 
has  been  placed  at  the  service  of  ideas  they 
were  afraid  to  analyse.  The  French  always 
want  to  find  out  first  just  what  the  concep- 
tions they  are  fighting  for  are  worth.  They 
will  not  be  downed  by  their  own  bogeys,  much 
less  by  anybody  else's.  The  young  Oedipus 
of  Ingres,  calmly  questioning  the  Sphinx,  is 
the  very  symbol  of  the  French  intelligence; 
and  it  is  because  of  her  dauntless  curiosity  that 
France  is  of  all  countries  the  most  grown  up. 

To  persons  unfamiliar  with  the  real  French 
character,  this  dauntless  curiosity  is  supposed 
to  apply  itself  chiefly  to  spying  out  and  dis- 
cussing acts  and  emotions  which  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  veils  from  publicity.  The  French  view 
of  what  are  euphemistically  called  "the  facts 
of  life"   (as  the  Greeks  called  the  Furies  the 


6o     French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

"Amiable  Ones")  is  often  spoken  of  as  though 
it  were  inconsistent  with  those  necessary  ele- 
ments of  any  ordered  society  that  we  call 
purity  and  morality.  Because  the  French  talk 
and  write  freely  about  subjects  and  situations 
that  Anglo-Saxons,  for  the  last  hundred  years 
(not  before) ,  have  agreed  not  to  mention,  it  is 
assumed  that  the  French  gloat  over  such  sub- 
jects and  situations.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  they 
simply  take  them  for  granted,  as  part  of  the 
great  parti-coloured  business  of  life,  and  no 
more  gloat  over  them  (in  the  morbid  intro- 
spective sense)  than  they  do  over  their  morn- 
ing cofifee. 

To  be  sure,  they  do  "gloat"  over  their  cof- 
fee in  a  sense  unknown  to  consumers  of  liquid 
chicory  and  health-beverages:  they  "gloat," 
in  fact,  over  everything  that  tastes  good,  looks 
beautiful,  or  appeals  to  any  one  of  their  acute 
and  highly-trained  five  senses.  But  they  do 
this  with  no  sense  of  greediness  or  shame  or 
immodesty,  and  consequently  without  morbid- 
ness or  waste  of  time.    They  take  the  normal 


Intellectual  Honesty  6i 

pleasures,  physical  and  aesthetic,  "in  their 
stride,"  so  to  speak,  as  wholesome,  nourishing, 
and  necessary  for  the  background  of  a  labori 
ous  life  of  business  or  study,  and  not  as  sub- 
jects for  nasty  prying  or  morbid  self-examina- 
tion. 

It  is  necessary  for  any  one  who  would  judge 
France  fairly  to  get  this  fundamental  differ- 
ence fixed  in  his  mind  before  forming  an  opin- 
ion of  the  illustrated  "funny  papers,"  of  the 
fiction,  the  theatres,  the  whole  trend  of  French 
humour,  irony  and  sentiment.  Well-meaning 
people  waste  much  time  in  seeking  to  prove 
that  Gallic  and  Anglo-Saxon  minds  take  the 
same  view  of  such  matters,  and  that  the  Vie 
Parisienne,  the  "little  theatres"  and  the  light 
fiction  of  France  do  not  represent  the  average 
French  temperament,  but  are  a  vile  attempt 
(by  foreign  agents)  to  cater  to  foreign  por- 
nography. 

The  French  have  always  been  a  gay  and 
free  and  Rabelaisian  people.  They  attach  a 
great  deal  of  importance  to  love-making,  but 


62    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

they  consider  it  more  simply  and  less  solemnly 
than  we.  They  are  cool,  resourceful  and 
merry,  crack  jokes  about  the  relations  between 
the  sexes,  and  are  used  to  the  frank  discussion 
of  what  some  one  tactfully  called  "the  opera- 
tions of  Nature."  They  are  puzzled  by  our 
queer  fear  of  our  own  bodies,  and  accustomed 
to  relate  openly  and  unapologetically  the 
anecdotes  that  Anglo-Saxons  snicker  over  pri- 
vately and  with  apologies.  They  define  por- 
nography as  a  taste  for  the  nasty,  and  not  as 
an  interest  in  the  natural.  But  nothing  would 
be  more  mistaken  than  to  take  this  as  proving 
that  family  feeling  is  less  deep  and  tender  in 
France  than  elsewhere,  or  the  conception  of 
the  social  virtues  different.  It  means  merely 
that  the  French  are  not  frightened  by  the 
names  of  things ;  that  they  dislike  what  we  call 
coarseness  much  less  than  what  they  call 
pruriency;  and  that  they  have  too  great  a  faith 
in  the  fundamental  life-forces,  and  too  much 
tenderness  for  the  young  mother  suckling  her 
baby,  for  Daphnis  and  Chloe  in  the  orchard 


Intellectual  Honesty  63 

at  dawn,  and  Philemon  and  Baucis  on  their 
threshold  at  sunset,  not  to  wonder  at  our  being 
ashamed  of  any  of  the  processes  of  nature. 

It  is  convenient  to  put  the  relations  between 
the  sexes  first  on  the  list  of  subjects  about 
which  the  French  and  Anglo-Saxon  races 
think  and  behave  differently,  because  it  is  the 
difference  which  strikes  the  superficial  ob- 
server first,  and  which  has  been  most  used  in 
the  attempt  to  prove  the  superior  purity  of 
Anglo-Saxon  morals.  But  French  outspoken- 
ness would  not  be  interesting  if  it  applied  only 
to  sex-questions,  for  savages  are  outspoken 
about  those,  too.  The  French  attitude  in  that 
respect  is  interesting  only  as  typical  of  the  gen- 
eral intellectual  fearlessness  of  France.  She 
is  not  afraid  of  anything  that  concerns  man- 
kind, neither  of  pleasure  and  mirth  nor  of 
exultations  and  agonies. 

The  French  are  intrinsically  a  tough  race: 
they  are  careless  of  pain,  unafraid  of  risks, 
contemptuous  of  precautions.  They  have  no 
idea  that  life  can  be  evaded,  and  if  it  could  be 


64    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

they  would  not  try  to  evade  it.  They  regard 
it  as  a  gift  so  magnificent  that  they  are  ready 
to  take  the  bad  weather  with  the  fine  rather 
than  miss  a  day  of  the  golden  year. 

It  is  this  innate  intellectual  honesty,  the  spe- 
cific distinction  of  the  race,  which  has  made  it 
the  torch-bearer  of  the  world.  Bishop  But- 
ler's celebrated:  "Things  are  as  they  are  and 
will  be  as  they  will  be"  might  have  been  the 
motto  of  the  French  intellect.  It  is  an  axiom 
that  makes  dull  minds  droop,  but  exalts  the 
brain  imaginative  enough  to  be  amazed  before 
the  marvel  of  things  as  they  are. 

II 

Mr.  Howells,  I  feel  sure,  will  forgive  me 
if  I  quote  here  a  comment  I  once  heard  him 
make  on  theatrical  taste  in  America.  We  had 
been  talking  of  that  strange  exigency  of  the 
American  public  which  compels  the  dramatist 
(if  he  wishes  to  be  played)  to  wind  up  his 
play,  whatever  its  point  of  departure,  with  the 
"happy-ever-after"  of  the  fairy-tales;  and  I 


Intellectual  Honesty  61; 

had  remarked  that  this  did  not  imply  a  prefer- 
ence for  comedy,  but  that,  on  the  contrary,  our 
audiences  want  to  be  harrowed  (and  even 
slightly  shocked)  from  eight  till  ten-thirty, 
and  then  consoled  and  reassured  before  eleven. 

"Yes,"  said  Mr.  Howells;  "what  the  Amer- 
ican public  wants  is  a  tragedy  with  a  happy 
ending." 

What  Mr.  Howells  said  of  the  American 
theatre  is  true  of  the  whole  American  attitude 
toward  life. 

*'A  tragedy  with  a  happy  ending"  is  exactly 
what  the  child  wants  before  he  goes  to  sleep : 
the  reassurance  that  "all's  well  with  the 
world"  as  he  lies  in  his  cosy  nursery.  It  is  a 
good  thing  that  the  child  should  receive  this 
reassurance;  but  as  long  as  he  needs  it  he  re- 
mains a  child,  and  the  world  he  lives  in  is  a 
nursery-world.  Things  are  not  always  and 
everpvhere  well  with  the  world,  and  each  man 
has  to  find  it  out  as  he  grows  up.  It  is  the 
finding  out  that  makes  him  grow,  and  until  he 


66    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

has  faced  the  fact  and  digested  the  lesson  he  is 
not  grown  up — he  is  still  in  the  nursery. 

The  same  thing  is  true  of  countries  and  peo- 
ples. The  ''sheltered  life,"  whether  of  the 
individual  or  of  the  nation,  must  either  have 
a  violent  and  tragic  awakening — or  never 
wake  up  at  all.  The  keen  French  intelligence 
perceived  this  centuries  ago,  and  has  always 
preferred  to  be  awake  and  alive,  at  whatever 
cost.  The  cost  has  been  heavy,  but  the  results 
have  been  worth  it,  for  France  leads  the  world 
intellectually  just  because  she  is  the  most 
grown  up  of  the  nations. 

In  each  of  the  great  nations  there  is  a  small 
minority  which  is  at  about  the  same  level  of 
intellectual  culture;  but  it  is  not  between  these 
minorities  (though  even  here  the  level  is  per- 
haps higher  in  France)  that  comparisons  may 
profitably  be  made.  A  cross-section  of  aver- 
age life  must  be  taken,  and  compared  with  the 
same  average  in  a  country  like  ours,  to  under- 
stand why  France  leads  in  the  world  of  ideas. 

The  theatre  has  an  importance  in  France 


Intellectual  Honesty  67 

which  was  matched  only  in  the  most  glorious 
days  of  Greece.  The  dramatic  sense  of  the 
French,  their  faculty  of  perceiving  and  enjoy- 
ing the  vivid  contrasts  and  ironies  of  daily 
life,  and  their  ability  to  express  emotion  where 
Anglo-Saxons  can  only  choke  with  it,  this  in- 
nate dramatic  gift,  which  is  a  part  of  their 
general  artistic  endowment,  leads  them  to  at- 
tach an  importance  to  the  theatre  incompre- 
hensible to  our  blunter  races. 

Americans  new  to  France,  and  seeing  it  first 
in  war-time,  will  be  continually  led  to  over- 
look the  differences  and  see  the  resemblances 
between  the  two  countries.  They  will  notice, 
for  instance,  that  the  same  kind  of  people  who 
pack  the  music-halls  and  "movie-shows"  at 
home  also  pack  them  in  France.  But  if  they 
will  take  a  seat  at  the  one  of  the  French  na- 
tional theatres  (the  Theatre  Frangais  or  the 
Odeon)  they  will  see  people  of  the  same  level 
of  education  as  those  of  the  cinema-halls  en- 
joying with  keen  discrimination  a  tragedy  by 
Racine  or  a  drama   of  Victor  Hugo's.     In 


68    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

America  the  "movie"  and  music-hall  audi- 
ences require  no  higher  form  of  nourishment. 
In  France  they  do,  and  the  Thursday  mat- 
inees in  theatres  which  give  the  classic  drama 
are  as  packed  as  the  house  where  "The  Mys- 
teries of  New  York"  are  unrolled,  while  on 
the  occasion  of  the  free  performances  given 
on  national  holidays  in  these  theatres  a  line 
composed  of  working-people,  poor  students 
and  all  kinds  of  modest  wage-earners  forms 
at  the  door  hours  before  the  performance  be- 
gins. 

The  people  who  assist  at  these  great  tragic- 
performances  have  a  strong  enough  sense  o/ 
reality  to  understand  the  part  that  grief  and 
calamity  play  in  life  and  in  art:  they  feel 
instinctively  that  no  real  art  can  be  based  on 
a  humbugging  attitude  toward  life,  and  it  is 
their  intellectual  honesty  which  makes  them 
exact  and  enjoy  its  fearless  representation. 

It  is  also  their  higher  average  of  education, 
of  "culture"  it  would  be  truer  to  say,  if  the 
word,  VvHth  us,  had  not  come  to  stand  for  the 


Intellectual  Honesty  69 

pretence  rather  than  the  reality.  Education 
in  its  elementary  sense  is  much  more  general 
in  America  than  in  France.  There  are  more 
people  who  can  read  in  the  United  States;  but 
what  do  they  read?  The  whole  point,  as  far 
as  any  real  standard  goes,  is  there.  If  the  abil- 
ity to  read  carries  the  average  man  no  higher 
than  the  gossip  of  his  neighbours,  if  he  asks 
nothing  more  nourishing  out  of  books  and  the 
theatre  than  he  gets  in  hanging  about  the  store, 
the  bar  and  the  street-corner,  then  culture  is 
bound  to  be  dragged  down  to  him  instead  of 
his  being  lifted  up  by  culture. 

Ill 

The  very  significance — the  note  of  ridicule 
and  slight  contempt — which  attaches  to  the 
word  "culture"  in  America,  would  be  quite 
unintelligible  to  the  French  of  any  class.  It 
is  inconceivable  to  them  that  any  one  should 
consider  it  superfluous,  and  even  slightly 
comic,  to  know  a  great  deal,  to  know  the  best 


70    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

in  every  line,  to  know,  in  fact,  as  much  as  pos- 
sible. 

There  are  ignorant  and  vulgar-minded  peo- 
ple in  France,  as  in  other  countries;  but  in- 
stead of  dragging  the  popular  standard  of  cul- 
ture down  to  their  own  level,  and  ridiculing 
knowledge  as  the  afiFectation  of  a  self-con- 
scious clique,  they  are  obliged  to  esteem  it,  to 
pretend  to  have  it,  and  to  try  and  talk  its  lan- 
guage— which  is  not  a  bad  way  of  beginning 
to  acquire  it. 

The  odd  Anglo-Saxon  view  that  a  love  of 
beauty  and  an  interest  in  ideas  imply  effem- 
inacy is  quite  unintelligible  to  the  French;  as 
unintelligible  as,  for  instance,  the  other  notion 
that  athletics  make  men  manly. 

The  French  would  say  that  athletics  make 
men  m.uscular,  that  education  makes  them  effi- 
cient, and  that  what  makes  them  manly  is  their 
general  view,  of  life,  or,  in  other  words,  the 
completeness  of  their  intellectual  honesty. 
And  the  conduct  of  Frenchmen  during  the 
last  four  and  a  half  years  looks  as  though  there 


Intellectual  Honesty  71 

were  something  to  be  said  in  favour  of  this 
opinion. 

The  French  are  persuaded  that  the  enjoy- 
ment of  beauty  and  the  exercise  of  the  critical 
intelligence  are  two  of  the  things  best  worth 
living  for;  and  the  notion  that  art  and  knowl- 
edge could  ever,  in  a  civilised  state,  be  re- 
garded as  negligible,  or  subordinated  to 
merely  material  interests,  would  never  occur 
to  them.  It  does  not  follow  that  everything 
they  create  is  beautiful,  or  that  their  ideas  are 
always  valuable  or  interesting;  what  matters 
is  the  esteem  in  which  the  whole  race  holds 
ideas  and  their  noble  expression. 

Theoretically,  America  holds  art  and  ideas 
in  esteem  also;  but  she  does  not,  as  a  people, 
seek  or  desire  them.  This  indifference  is 
partly  due  to  awe :  America  has  not  lived  long 
at  her  ease  with  beauty,  like  the  old  European 
races  w^hose  art  reaches  back  through  an  un- 
broken inheritance  of  thousands  of  years  of 
luxury  and  culture. 

It  would  have  been  unreasonable  to  expect 


72    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

a  new  country,  plunged  in  the  struggle  with 
material  necessities,  to  create  an  art  of  her 
own,  or  to  have  acquired  familiarity  enough 
with  the  great  arts  of  the  past  to  feel  the  need 
of  them  as  promoters  of  enjoyment,  or  to  un- 
derstand their  value  as  refining  and  civilising 
influences.  But  America  is  now  ripe  to  take 
her  share  in  the  long  inheritance  of  the  races 
she  descends  from;  and  it  is  a  pity  that  just 
at  this  time  the  inclination  of  the  immense 
majority  of  Americans  is  setting  away  from  all 
real  education  and  real  culture. 

Intellectual  honesty  w^as  never  so  little  ih' 
respect  in  the  United  States  as  in  the  years  be- 
fore the  war.  Every  sham  and  substitute  for 
education  and  literature  and  art  had  steadily 
crowded  out  the  real  thing.  "Get-rich-quick" 
is  a  much  less  dangerous  device  than  "get- 
educated-quick,"  but  the  popularity  of  the 
first  has  led  to  the  attempt  to  realise  the  sec- 
ond. It  is  possible  to  get  rich  quickly  in  a 
country  full  of  money-earning  chances;  but 
there  is  no  short-cut  to  education. 


Intellectual  Honesty  73 

a 

Perhaps  it  has  been  an  advantage  to  the 
French  to  have  had  none  of  our  chances  of 
sudden  enrichment.  Perhaps  the  need  of  ac- 
cumulating money  slowly  leads  people  to  be 
content  with  less,  and  consequently  gives  them 
more  leisure  to  care  for  other  things.  There 
could  be  no  greater  error — as  all  Americans 
.know — than  to  think  that  America's  ability  to 
make  money  quickly  has  made  her  heedless  of 
other  values;  but  it  has  set  the  pace  for  the 
pursuit  of  those  other  values,  a  pursuit  that 
I'^ads  to  their  being  trampled  underfoot  in  the 
general  rush  for  them. 

The  French,  at  any  rate,  living  more  slowly, 
have  learned  the  advantage  of  living  more 
deeply.  In  science,  in  art,  in  technical  and 
industrial  training,  they  know  the  need  of  tak- 
ing time,  and  the  wastefulness  of  superficial- 
iy.  French  university  education  is  a  long 
and  stern  process,  but  it  produces  minds  ca- 
pable of  more  sustained  effort  and  a  larger 
range  of  thought  than  our  quick  doses  of  learn- 
ing.   And  this  strengthening  discipline  of  the 


74      French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

mind  has  preserved  the  passion  for  intellec- 
tual honesty.  No  race  is  so  little  addicted  to 
fads,  for  fads  are  generally  untested  proposi- 
tions. The  French  tendency  is  to  test  every 
new  theory,  religious,  artistic  or  scientific,  in 
the  light  of  wide  knowledge  and  experience, 
and  to  adopt  it  only  if  it  stands  this  scrutiny. 
It  is  for  this  reason  that  France  has  so  few 
religions,  so  few  philosophies,  and  so  few 
quick  cures  for  mental  or  physical  woes.  And 
it  is  for  this  reason  also  that  there  are  so  few 
advertisements  in  French  newspapers. 

Nine-tenths  of  English  and  American  ad- 
vertising is  based  on  the  hope  that  some  one 
has  found  a  way  of  doing  something,  or  curing 
some  disease,  or  overcoming  some  infirmity, 
more  quickly  than  by  the  accepted  methods. 
The  French  are  too  incredulous  of  short-cuts 
and  nostrums  to  turn  to  such  promises  with 
much  hope.  Their  unshakeable  intellectual 
honesty  and  their  sound  intellectual  training 
lead  them  to  distrust  any  way  but  the  strait 
and  narrow  one  when  a  difficulty  is  to  be  mas- 


Intellectual  Honesty  75 

tered  or  an  art  acquired.  They  are  above  all 
democratic  in  their  steady  conviction  that 
there  is  no  "royal  road"  to  the  worth-while 
things,  and  that  every  yard  of  the  Way  to 
Wisdom  has  to  be  travelled  on  foot,  and  not 
spun  over  in  a  joy-ride. 


V 

CONTINUITY 

I 
'AVE  you  ever  watched  the  attempt  of 
any  one  who  does  not  know  how  to 
draw  to  put  down  on  paper  the 
roughest  kind  of  representation  of  a  house  or 
a  horse  or  a  human  being? 

The  difficulty  and  perplexity  (to  any  one 
not  born  with  the  drawling  instinct)  caused 
by  the  effort  of  reproducing  an  object  one  can 
walk  around  are  extraordinary  and  unex- 
pected. The  thing  is  there,  facing  the 
draughtsman,  the  familiar  everyday  thing — 
and  a  few  strokes  on  paper  ought  to  give  at 
least  a  recognisable  suggestion  of  it. 

But  what  kind  of  strokes  ?  And  what  curves 
or  angles  ought  they  to  follow?    Try  and  see 

for  yourself,  if  you  have  never  been  taught 

76 


Continuity  77 


to  draw,  and  if  no  instinct  tells  you  how.  Evi- 
dently there  is  some  trick  about  it  which  must 
be  learned. 

It  takes  a  great  deal  of  training  and  obser- 
vation to  learn  the  trick  and  represent  recog- 
nisably  the  simplest  three-dimensional  thing, 
much  less  an  animal  or  a  human  being  in 
movement.  And  it  takes  a  tradition  too:  it 
presupposes  the  existence  of  some  one  capable 
of  handing  on  the  trick,  which  has  already 
been  handed  on  to  him. 

Thirty  thousand  years  ago — or  perhaps 
more — there  were  men  in  France  so  advanced 
in  observation  and  training  of  eye  and  hand 
that  they  could  represent  fishes  swimming  in 
a  river,  stags  grazing  or  fighting,  bison  charg- 
ing with  lowered  heads  or  lying  down  and 
licking  their  own  shoulders— could  even  rep- 
resent Vv'omcn  dancing  in  a  round,  and  long 
lines  of  reindeer  in  perspective,  vv^ith  horns 
gradually  diminishing  in  size. 

It  is  only  twenty  years  ago  that  the  first 
cavern  decorated  with   prehistoric   paintings 


yS    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

was  discovered  at  Altamira,  in  north-western 
Spain.  Its  discoverer  was  regarded  with  sus- 
picion and  contempt  by  the  archsologists  of 
the  period :  they  let  him  see  that  they  thought 
him  an  impostor  and  he  died  without  having 
been  able  to  convince  the  learned  world  that 
he  had  not  had  a  hand  in  decorating  the  roof 
of  the  cave  of  Altamira  with  its  wonderful 
troops  of  inter-glacial  animals.  But  ten  or 
twelve  years  later  the  discovery  of  similar 
painted  caves  in  all  directions  north  and  south 
of  the  Pyrenees  at  last  vindicated  Sefior  Sau- 
tola's  sincerity,  and  set  the  students  of  civilisa- 
tion hastily  revising  their  chronologies;  and 
since  then  proofs  of  the  consummate  skill  of 
these  men  of  the  dawn  have  been  found  on  the 
walls  of  caves  and  grottoes  all  over  central  and 
southern  France,  throughout  the  very  region 
where  our  American  soldiers  have  been  camp- 
ing, and  where  our  convalescents  are  now 
basking  in  the  warm  Mediterranean  sun. 

The  study  of  prehistoric  art  is  just  begin- 
ning, but  already  it  has  been  found  that  draw- 


Continuity  79 


ing,  painting  and  even  sculpture  of  a  highly 
developed  kind  were  practised  in  France  long 
before  Babylon  rose  in  its  glory,  or  the  foun- 
dations of  the  undermost  Troy  were  laid.  In 
fact,  all  that  is  known  of  the  earliest  historic 
civilisations  is  recent  in  date  compared  with 
the  wonderful  fore-shortened  drawings  and 
clay  statues  of  the  French  Stone  Age. 

The  traces  of  a  very  ancient  culture  discov- 
ered in  the  United  States  and  in  Central 
America  prove  the  far-off  existence  of  an  ar- 
tistic and  civic  development  unknown  to  the 
races  found  by  the  first  European  explorers. 
But  the  origin  and  date  of  these  vanished 
societies  are  as  yet  unguessed  at,  and  even  were 
it  otherwise  they  would  not  count  in  our  ar- 
tistic and  social  inheritance,  since  the  English 
and  Dutch  colonists  found  only  a  wilderness 
peopled  by  savages,  who  had  kept  no  link  of 
memory  with  those  vanished  societies.  There 
had  been  a  complete  break  of  continuity. 


8o    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

II 

In  France  it  was  otherwise. 

Any  one  who  really  wants  to  understand 
France  must  bear  in  mind  that  French  culture 
is  the  most  homogeneous  and  uninterrupted 
culture  the  world  has  known.  It  is  true  that 
waves  of  invasion,  just  guessed  at  on  the  verge 
of  the  historic  period,  must  have  swept  aw^ay 
the  astounding  race  w^ho  adorned  the  caves  of 
central  and  south-western  France  with  draw- 
ings matching  those  of  the  Japanese  in  sup- 
pleness and  audacity;  for  after  that  far-off 
flowering  time  the  prehistorian  comes  on  a 
period  of  retrogression  when  sculptor  and 
draughtsman  fumbled  clumsily  with  their  im- 
plements. The  golden  age  of  prehistory  was 
over.  Waves  of  cold,  invasions  of  savage 
hordes,  all  the  violent  convulsions  of  a  world 
in  the  making,  swept  over  the  earliest  France 
and  almost  swept  her  away:  almost,  but  not 
quite.  Soon,  Phoenicia  and  Greece  were  to 
reach  her  from  the  south,  soon  after  that  Rome 
was  to  stamp  her  once  for  all  with  the  stamp 


Continuity  8i 


of  Roman  citizenship;  and  in  the  intervals 
between  these  events  the  old,  almost  vanished 
culture  doubtless  lingered  in  the  caves  and 
river-beds,  handed  on  something  of  its  great 
tradition,  kept  alive,  in  the  hidden  nooks 
which  cold  and  savages  spared,  little  hearths 
of  artistic  vitality. 

It  would  appear  that  all  the  while  people 
went  on  obscurely  modelling  clay,  carving 
horn  and  scratching  drawings  on  the  walls  of 
just  such  river-cliff  houses  as  the  peasants  of 
Burgundy  live  in  to  this  day,  thus  nursing 
the  faint  embers  of  tradition  that  were  to  leap 
into  beauty  at  the  touch  of  Greece  and  Rome. 
And  even  if  it  seems  fanciful  to  believe  that 
the  actual  descendants  of  the  cave-painters 
survived  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  their 
art,  or  its  memory,  was  transmitted.  If  even 
this  link  with  the  past  seems  too  slight  to  be 
worth  counting,  the  straight  descent  of  French 
civilisation  from  the  ancient  Mediterranean 
culture  which  penetrated  her  by  the  Rhone 
and  Spain  and   the  Alps  would  explain  the 


82    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ripeness  and  the  continuity  of  her  social  life. 
By  her  geographic  position  she  seemed  des- 
tined to  centralise  and  cherish  the  scattered 
fires  of  these  old  societies. 

What  is  true  of  plastic  art  must  of  course 
be  true  of  the  general  culture  it  implies.  The 
people  of  France  went  on  living  in  France, 
surviving  cataclysms,  perpetuating  traditions, 
handing  down  and  down  and  down  certain 
ways  of  ploughing  and  sowing  and  vine-dress- 
ing and  dyeing  and  tanning  and  working  and 
hoarding,  in  the  same  valleys  and  on  the  same 
river-banks  as  their  immemorially  remote 
predecessors. 

Could  anything  be  in  greater  contrast  to 
the  sudden  uprooting  of  our  American  an- 
cestors and  their  violent  cutting  off  from  all 
their  past,  when  they  set  out  to  create  a  new 
state  in  a  new  hemisphere,  in  a  new  climate, 
and  out  of  new  materials? 

How  little  the  old  peasant-tradition  of  ru- 
ral England  lingered  among  the  uprooted  col- 
onists, who  had  to  change  so  abruptly  all  their 


Continuity  83 


agricultural  and  domestic  habits,  is  shown  in 
the  prompt  disappearance  from  our  impov- 
erished American  vocabulary  of  nearly  all 
the  old  English  words  relating  to  fields  and 
woods.  What  has  become,  in  America,  of  the 
copse,  the  spinney,  the  hedgerow,  the  dale, 
the  vale,  the  weald?  .We  have  reduced  all  tim- 
ber to  ''woods,"  and,  even  that  plural  appear- 
ing excessive,  one  hears  Americans  who  ought 
to  know  better  speak  of  "<2  woods,"  as  though 
the  familiar  word  has  lost  part  of  its  meaning 
to  them. 

This  instance  from  our  own  past — to  which 
might  be  added  so  many  more  illustrating  the 
deplorable  loss  of  shades  of  difference  in  our 
blunted  speech — will  help  to  show  the  con- 
trast between  a  race  that  has  had  a  long  con- 
tinuance and  a  race  that  has  had  a  recent  be- 
ginning. 

The  English  and  Dutch  settlers  of  North 
America  no  doubt  carried  many  things  with 
them,  such  vital  but  imponderable  things  as 
prejudices,  principles,  laws  and  beliefs.     But 


84    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

even  these  were  strangely  transformed  when 
at  length  the  colonists  emerged  again  from  the 
backwoods  and  the  bloody  Indian  warfare. 
The  stern  experience  of  the  pioneer,  the  neces- 
sity of  rapid  adaptation  and  of  constantly  im- 
provised expedients,  formed  a  far  different 
preparation  from  that  dogged  resistance  to 
invasion,  that  clinging  to  the  same  valley  and 
the  same  river-cliff,  that  have  made  the 
French,  literally  as  well  as  figuratively,  the 
most  conservative  of  western  races.  They  also 
had  passionate  convictions  and  fierce  wants, 
like  other  peoples  trying  to  organise  them- 
selves; but  the  idea  of  leaving  France  in  order 
to  safeguard  their  convictions  and  satisfy  their 
wants  would  never  have  occurred  to  the 
French  Huguenots  if  the  religious  wars  of  the 
sixteenth  century  and  the  Revocation  of  the 
Edict  of  Nantes  had  not  made  France  literally 
uninhabitable.  The  English  Puritans  left 
England  only  to  gain  greater  liberty  for  the 
independent  development  of  their  peculiar 
political  and  religious  ideas;  they  were  not 


Continuity  85 


driven  out  with  fire  and  sword  as  the  Hugue- 
nots were  driven  from  France. 

Why,  then,  one  wonders,  did  the  French 
people  cling  to  France  with  such  tenacity — 
since  none  are  more  passionate  in  their  con- 
victions and  prejudices  where  anything  short 
of  emigration  is  concerned?  They  clung  to 
France  because  they  loved  it,  and  for  such 
sentimental  fidelity  some  old  underlying  eco- 
nomic reason  usually  exists.  The  map  of 
France,  and  the  climate  of  France,  show  what 
the  reason  was.  France,  as  her  historians 
have  long  delighted  to  point  out,  is  a  country 
singularly  privileged  in  her  formation,  and 
in  the  latitude  she  occupies.  She  is  magnifi- 
cently fed  with  great  rivers,  which  flow  where 
it  is  useful  for  commerce  and  agriculture  that 
they  should  flow.  The  lines  of  her  mountain- 
ranges  formed  natural  ramparts  in  the  past, 
and  in  the  south  and  south-west,  serve  as  great 
wind-screens  and  sun-reflectors,  creating  al- 
most tropic  corners  under  a  temperate  lati- 
tude.   Her  indented  coast  opens  into  many  ca- 


86    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

pacious  and  sheltered  harbours,  and  the 
course  of  the  Gulf  Stream  bends  in  to  soften 
the  rainy  climate  of  her  great  western  penin- 
sula, making  Brittany  almost  as  warm  as  the 
sunnier  south. 

Above  all,  the  rich  soil  of  France,  so  pre- 
cious for  wheat  and  corn-growing,  is  the  best 
soil  in  the  world  for  the  vine;  and  a  people 
can  possess  few  more  civilising  assets  than  the 
ability  to  produce  good  wine  at  home.  It  is 
the  best  safeguard  against  alcoholism,  the  best 
incentive  to  temperance  in  the  manly  and 
grown-up  sense  of  the  word,  which  means  vol- 
untary sobriety  and  not  legally  enforced  ab- 
stinence. 

All  these  gifts  France  had  and  the  French 
intelligently  cherished.  Between  the  Swiss 
snows  and  the  icy  winter  fogs  of  Germany  on 
the  one  side,  and  the  mists  and  rain  and  per- 
petual dampness  of  England  on  the  other,  her 
cool  mild  sky  shot  with  veiled  sunlight  over- 
hung a  land  of  temperate  beauty  and  temper- 
ate wealth.     Farther  north,  man  might  grow 


Continuity  87 


austere  or  gross,  farther  south  idle  and  im- 
provident: France  offered  the  happy  mean 
which  the  poets  are  forever  celebrating,  and 
the  French  were  early  aware  that  the  poets 
were  right. 

Ill 

Satisfaction  with  a  happy  mean  implies  the 
power  to  choose,  the  courage  to  renounce. 

The  French  had  chosen:  they  chose  France. 
They  had  to  renounce;  and  they  renounced 
Adventure. 

Staying  in  France  was  not  likely  to  make 
any  man  inordinately  rich  in  his  life-time; 
forsaking  France  to  acquire  sudden  wealth 
was  unthinkable.  The  Frenchman  did  not  de- 
sire inordinate  wealth  for  himself,  but  he 
wanted,  and  was  bound  to  have,  material  se- 
curity for  his  children.  Therefore  the  price  to 
be  paid  for  staying  at  home,  and  keeping  one's 
children  with  one  (an  absolute  necessity  to  the 
passionately  tender  French  parent),  was  per- 
petual, sleepless,  relentless  thrift.    The  money 


88    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

necessary  to  security  had  to  be  accumulated 
slowly  and  painfully,  so  the  Frenchman 
learned  to  be  industrious,  and  to  train  his 
children  to  industry;  and  that  money  had  to 
be  kept  fast  hold  of,  since  any  profitable  in- 
vestment meant  Risk. 

Risk  and  Adventure  were  the  two  dreaded 
enemies  that  might,  at  a  stroke,  deprive  one 
of  the  bliss  of  living  in  France,  or  of  the  mod- 
icum of  well-being  necessary  to  live  there  in 
comfort,  as  the  unluxurious  French  under- 
stand it.  Against  Risk  and  Adventure,  there- 
fore, it  is  the  French  parent's  duty  to  warn 
and  protect  his  children.  Brought  up  in  this 
atmosphere  of  timidity  and  distrust  of  the  un- 
known, generation  after  generation  of  young 
Frenchmen  became  saturated  with  the  same 
fears;  and  those  among  them  who  tried  to 
break  through  the  strong  network  of  tradition, 
and  venture  their  inheritance  or  their  lives  in 
quest  of  new  things,  were  restrained  by  the 
fierce  conservatism  of  the  women  and  the  in- 
sinuating tyranny  of  French  family  life. 


Continuity  89 


It  is  useless  to  deny  that,  to  Anglo-Saxon 
eyes,  the  niggardliness  of  the  French  is  their 
most  incomprehensible  trait.  The  reluctance 
to  give,  the  general  lack  of  spontaneous  and 
impulsive  generosity,  even  in  times  of  such 
tragic  appeal  as  the  war  has  created,  have 
too  often  astonished-  and  pained  those  who 
most  admire  the  French  character  to  be  passed 
over  in  any  frank  attempt  to  understand  it. 

During  the  most  cataclysmic  moments  of 
the  war,  when  it  seemed  that  a  few  days  or 
weeks  might  bring  the  world  crashing  down 
in  ruins,  and  sweep  away  all  that  made  life 
tolerable  and  material  ease  a  thing  w^orth  con- 
sidering— even  then  (though  one  could  of 
course  cite  individual  cases  of  the  noblest  gen- 
erosity), the  sense  of  the  imprudence  of  un- 
calculated  generosity  still  prevailed,  and  in 
France  money  never  poured  forth  for  the  re- 
lief of  suffering  as  it  did  in  England. 

The  same  clinging  to  tradition  and  fear  of 
risk  which  make  prudence  almost  a  vice  in 
the  French  are  not  applied  only  to  money- 


90   French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

saving.  The  French  too  often  economise 
manners  as  they  do  francs.  The  discovery  is 
disillusionising  until  one  goes  back  to  its 
cause,  and  learns  to  understand  that,  in  a  so- 
ciety based  on  caution,  and  built  about  an  old 
and  ineradicable  bureaucracy,  obsequiousness 
on  the  one  side  is  sure  to  breed  discourtesy  on 
the  other. 

No  one  knows  more  than  the  French  about 
good  manners:  manners  are  codified  in 
France,  and  there  is  the  possibility  of  an  in- 
sult in  the  least  deviation  from  established 
procedure,  such  as  using  the  wrong  turn  in 
signing  a  note,  as,  for  example,  putting 
"Agreez,  Monsieur"  where  "Veuillez  agreer, 
Monsieur"  is  in  order,  or  substituting  ''senti- 
ments distingues"  for  "haute  consideration." 
Unfortunately,  in  the  process,  the  forms  of 
courtesy  have  turned  into  the  sharp-edged  me- 
tallic counters  of  a  game,  instead  of  being  a 
spontaneous  emission  of  human  kindliness. 

The  French  are  kind  in  the  sense  of  not  be- 
ing cruel,  but  they  are  not  kindly,  in  the  sense 


Continuity  91 


of  diffused  benevolence  which  the  word  im- 
plies to  Anglo-Saxons.  They  are  passionate 
and  yet  calculating,  and  simple  uncalcu- 
lated  kindliness — the  vague  effusion  of  good- 
will toward  unknown  fellow-beings — does  not 
enter  into  a  plan  of  life  which  is  as  settled, 
ruled  off  and  barricaded  as  their  carefully- 
measured  and  bounded  acres.  It  savours  too 
much  of  Adventure,  and  might  lead  one  into 
the  outer  darknesses  of  Risk. 

If  one  makes  such  a  criticism  to  a  French 
friend,  in  any  candid  discussion  of  race-differ- 
ences, the  answer  is  always:  "Of  course  you 
Anglo-Saxons  are  more  generous,  because  you 
are  so  much  richer." 

But  this  explanation,  though  doubtless  sin- 
cere, is  not  exact.  We  are  more  generous  not 
because  we  are  richer,  but  because  we  are  so 
much  less  afraid  of  being  poor;  and  if  we  are 
less  afraid  of  being  poor  it  is  due  to  the  fact 
that  our  ancestors  found  it  much  easier  to 
make  money,  not  only  because  they  were  more 


92    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

willing  to  take  risks,  but  because  more  oppor- 
tunities came  in  their  way. 

Once  these  arguments  are  balanced,  it  be- 
comes easier  to  allow  for  French  caution,  and 
to  overlook  it  in  favour  of  those  other  quali- 
ties which  their  way  of  life  has  enabled  the 
French  to  develop. 

IV 

First  among  these  qualities  is  the  power  of 
sustained  effort,  and  the  sense  of  its  need  in 
any  worth-while  achievement. 

The  French,  it  has  already  been  pointed 
out,  have  no  faith  in  short-cuts,  nostrums  or 
dodges  of  any  sort  to  get  around  a  difficulty. 
This  makes  them  appear  backward  in  the 
practical  administration  of  their  affairs;  but 
they  make  no  claim  to  teach  the  world  practi- 
cal efficiency.  What  they  have  to  teach  is 
something  infinitely  higher,  more  valuable, 
more  civilising:  that  in  the  world  of  ideas,  as 
in  the  world  of  art,  steady  and  disinterested 
effort  alone  can  accomplish  great  things. 


Continuity  93 


It  may  seem,  from  what  has  been  said  in  an 
earlier  part  of  this  chapter,  as  though  the 
French  were  of  all  people  the  most  interested, 
since  questions  of  money  so  constantly  preoc- 
cupy them.  But  their  thoughts  are  not  occu- 
pied with  money-making  in  itself,  as  an  end 
worth  living  for,  but  only  with  the  idea  of 
having  money  enough  to  be  sure  of  not  losing 
their  situation  in  life,  for  themselves  or  their 
children;  since,  little  as  they  care  to  rise  in 
the  world,  they  have  an  unspeakable  terror  of 
falling,  based  partly,  no  doubt,  on  the  pitiful 
fate,  in  France,  of  those  who  do  fall.  This 
point  assured,  they  want  only  enough  leisure 
and  freedom  from  material  anxiety  to  enjoy 
what  life  and  the  arts  of  life  ofifer.  This  ab- 
sence of  financial  ambition  should  never  be 
lost  sight  of:  it  is  not  only  the  best  clue  to  the 
French  character,  but  the  most  useful  lesson 
our  own  people  can  learn  from  contact  with 
France. 

The  requirements  of  the  average  French- 
man in  any  class  are  surprisin^^ly  few,  and  the 


94    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ambition  to  "better"  himself  socially  plays  a 
very  small  part  in  his  plans.  What  he  wants 
is  leisure  to  enjoy  the  fleeting  good  things  of 
life,  from  which  no  one  knows  better  how  to 
extract  a  temperate  delight,  and  full  liberty 
of  mind  to  discuss  general  ideas  while  pur- 
suing whatever  trade  or  art  he  is  engaged  in. 
It  may  seem  an  exaggeration  to  ascribe  such 
aspirations  to  the  average  man  of  any  race; 
but  compared  with  other  peoples  the  distin- 
guishing mark  of  the  Frenchman  of  all  classes 
is  the  determination  to  defend  his  own  leisure, 
the  taste  for  the  free  play  of  ideas,  and  the 
power  to  express  and  exchange  views  on  ques- 
tions of  general  interest. 

Great  shrewdness  and  maturity  of  judgment 
result  from  this  tendency  to  formulate  ideas: 
it  is  unusual  to  hear  a  French  peasant  or 
working  man  express  an  opinion  on  life  that 
is  not  sagacious.  Human  nature  is  a  subject 
of  absorbing  interest  to  the  French,  and  they 
have,  to  use  their  own  phrase,  "made  the  tour 
of  it,"  and  amply  allowed  for  it  in  all  their 


Continuity  95 


appreciations  of  life.  The  artless  astonish- 
ment of  the  northern  races  in  the  face  of  the 
oldest  of  human  phenomena  is  quite  incom- 
prehensible to  them. 

This  serenity  and  maturity  of  view  is  the 
result  of  an  immensely  old  inheritance  of  cul- 
ture; and  the  first  lesson  it  teaches  is  that 
Rome  was  not  built  in  a  day. 

Only  children  think  that  one  can  make  a 
garden  with  flowers  broken  from  the  plant; 
only  inexperience  imagines  that  novelty  is  al- 
ways synonymous  with  improvement.  To  go 
on  behaving  as  if  one  believed  these  things, 
and  to  foster  their  belief  in  others,  is  to  en- 
courage the  intellectual  laziness  which  rapid 
material  prosperity  is  too  apt  to  develop.  It 
is  to  imprison  one's  self  in  a  perpetual  imma- 
turity. The  French  express,  perhaps  uncon- 
sciously, their  sense  of  the  weight  of  their  own 
long  moral  experience  by  their  universal  com- 
ment on  the  American  fellows-in-arms  whose 
fine  qualities  they  so  fully  recognise.  '^Ce  sont 
des  enfants — they  are  mere  children!"  is  what 


96    French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

they  always  say  of  the  young  Americans:  say 
it  tenderly,  almost  anxiously,  like  people  pas- 
sionately attached  to  youth  and  to  the  young, 
but  also  with  a  little  surprise  at  the  narrow 
surface  of  perception  which  most  of  these 
young  minds  offer  to  the  varied  spectacle  of 
the  universe. 

A  new  race,  working  out  its  own  destiny  in 
new  conditions,  cannot  hope  for  the  moral  and 
intellectual  maturity  of  a  race  seated  at  the 
cross-roads  of  the  old  civilisations.  But 
America  has,  in  part  at  least,  a  claim  on  the 
great  general  inheritance  of  Western  culture. 
She  inherits  France  through  England,  and 
Rome  and  the  Mediterranean  culture, 
through  France.  These  are  indirect  and  re- 
mote sources  of  enrichment;  but  she  has  di- 
rectly, in  her  possession  and  in  her  keeping, 
the  magnificent,  the  matchless  inheritance  of 
English  speech  and  English  letters. 

Had  she  had  a  more  mature  sense  of  the 
value  of  tradition  and  the  strength  of  con- 
tinuity she  would  have  kept  a  more  reverent 


Continuity  97 


hold  upon  this  treasure,  and  the  culture  won 
from  it  would  have  been  an  hundredfold 
greater.  She  would  have  preserved  the  lan- 
guage instead  of  debasing  and  impoverishing 
it;  she  would  have  learned  the  historic  mean- 
ing of  its  words  instead  of  wasting  her  time  in- 
venting short-cuts  in  spelling  them;  she  would 
jealously  have  upheld  the  standards  of  its  lit- 
erature instead  of  lowering  them  to  meet  an 
increased  '^circulation." 

In  all  this,  France  has  a  lesson  to  teach  and 
a  warning  to  give.  It  was  our  English  for- 
bears who  taught  us  to  flout  tradition  and 
break  away  from  their  own  great  inheritance; 
France  may  teach  us  that,  side  by  side  with 
the  qualities  of  enterprise  and  innovation  that 
English  blood  has  put  in  us,  wc  should  cul- 
tivate the  sense  of  continuity,  that  "sense  of 
the  past"  which  enriches  the  present  and  binds 
us  up  with  the  world's  great  stabilising  tra- 
ditions of  art  and  poetry  and  knowledge. 


VI 

THE  NEW  FRENCHWOMAN 

THERE  is  no  new  Frenchwoman ;  but 
the  real  Frenchwoman  is  new  to 
America,  and  it  may  be  of  interest  to 
American  women  to  learn  something  of  what 
she  is  really  like. 

In  saying  that  the  real  Frenchwoman  is  new 
to  America  I  do  not  intend  to  draw  the  old  fa- 
miliar contrast  between  the  so-called  "real 
Frenchwoman"  and  the  Frenchwoman  of  fic- 
tion and  the  stage.  Americans  have  been  told 
a  good  many  thousand  times  in  the  last  four 
years  that  the  real  Frenchwoman  is  totally  dif- 
ferent from  the  person  depicted  under  that 
name  by  French  novelists  and  dramatists;  but 
in  truth  every  literature,  in  its  main  lines,  re- 
flects the  chief  characteristics  of  the  people 

for  whom,  and  about  whom,  it  is  written — 

08 


The  New  Frenchwoman  99 

and  none  more  so  than  French  literature,  the 
freest  and  frankest  of  all. 

The  statement  that  the  real  Frenchwoman 
is  new  to  America  simply  means  that  America 
has  never  before  taken  the  trouble  to  look  at 
her  and  try  to  understand  her.  She  has  always 
been  there,  waiting  to  be  understood,  and  a 
little  tired,  perhaps,  of  being  either  carica- 
tured or  idealised.  It  would  be  easy  enough 
to  palm  her  off  as  a  "new"  Frenchwoman  be- 
cause the  war  has  caused  her  to  live  a  new 
life  and  do  unfamiliar  jobs;  but  one  need  only 
look  at  the  illustrated  papers  to  see  what  she 
looks  like  as  a  tram-conductor,  a  taxi-driver  or 
a  munition-maker.  It  is  certain,  even  now, 
that  all  these  new  experiences  are  going  to 
modify  her  character,  and  to  enlarge  her  view 
of  life;  but  that  is  not  the  point  with  which 
these  papers  are  concerned.  The  first  thing 
for  the  American  woman  to  do  is  to  learn  to 
know  the  Frenchwoman  as  she  has  always 
been;  to  try  to  find  out  what  she  is,  and  why 
she  is  what  she  is.    After  that  it  will  be  easy  to 


loo  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

see  why  the  war  has  developed  in  her  certain 
qualities  rather  than  others,  and  what  its  after- 
effects on  her  are  likely  to  be. 

First  of  all,  she  is,  in  nearly  all  respects,  as 
different  as  possible  from  the  average  Ameri- 
can woman.  That  proposition  is  fairly  evi- 
dent, though  not  always  easy  to  explain.  Is  it 
because  she  dresses  better,  or  knows  more 
about  cooking,  or  is  more  "coquettish,"  or 
more  "feminine,"  or  more  excitable,  or  more 
emotional,  or  more  immoral?  All  these  rea- 
sons have  been  often  suggested,  but  none  of 
them  seems  to  furnish  a  complete  answer. 
Millions  of  American  women  are,  to  the  best 
of  their  ability  (which  is  not  small),  coquet- 
tish, feminine,  emotional,  and  all  the  rest  of 
it;  a  good  many  dress  as  well  as  Frenchwo- 
men ;  some  even  know  a  little  about  cooking — 
and  the  real  reason  is  quite  different,  and  not 
nearly  as  flattering  to  our  national  vanity.  It 
is  simply  that,  like  the  men  of  her  race,  the 
Frenchwoman  is  groicn  up. 

Compared  with  the  women  of  France  the 


The  New  Frenchwoman         ioi 

average  American  woman  is  still  in  the  kin- 
dergarten. The  world  she  lives  in  is  exactly 
like  the  most  improved  and  advanced  and 
scientifically  equipped  Montessori-method 
baby-school.  At  first  sight  it  may  seem  pre- 
posterous to  compare  the  American  woman's 
independent  and  resonant  activities — her 
"boards"  and  clubs  and  sororities,  her  public 
investigation  of  everything  under  the  heavens 
from  "the  social  evil"  to  baking-powder,  and 
from  "physical  culture"  to  the  newest  esoteric 
religion — to  compare  such  free  and  busy  and 
seemingly  influential  lives  with  the  artless  ex- 
ercises of  an  infant  class.  But  what  is  the  fun- 
damental principle  of  the  Montessori  system? 
It  is  the  development  of  the  child's  individu- 
ality, unrestricted  by  the  traditional  nursery 
discipline:  a  Montessori  school  is  a  baby 
world  where,  shut  up  together  in  the  most  im- 
proved hygienic  surroundings,  a  number  of 
infants  noisily  develop  their  individuality. 

The  reason  why  American  women  are  not 
really  "grown  up"  in  comparison  with   the 


I02  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 
1,  ' 

women  of  the  most  highly  civilised  countries 
— such  as  France — is  that  all  their  semblance 
of  freedom,  activity  and  authority  bears  not 
much  more  likeness  to  real  living  than  the  ex- 
ercises of  the  Montessori  infant.  Real  living, 
in  any  but  the  most  elementary  sense  of  the 
word,  is  a  deep  and  complex  and  slowly-de- 
veloped thing,  the  outcome  of  an  old  and  rich 
social  experience.  It  cannot  be  "got  up"  like 
gymnastics,  or  a  proficiency  in  foreign  lan- 
guages; it  has  its  roots  in  the  fundamental 
things,  and  above  all  in  close  and  constant  and 
interesting  and  important  relations  between 
men  and  women. 

It  is  because  American  women  are  each  oth- 
er's only  audience,  and  to  a  great  extent  each 
other's  only  companions,  that  they  seem,  com- 
pared to  women  who  play  an  intellectual  and 
social  part  in  the  lives  of  men,  like  children 
in  a  baby-school.  They  are  "developing  their 
individuality,"  but  developing  it  in  the  void, 
without  the  checks,  the  stimulus,  and  the  dis- 
cipline that  comes  of  contact  with  the  stronger 


The  New  Frenchwoman         103 


masculine  individuality.  And  it  is  not  only 
because  the  man  is  the  stronger  and  the  closer 
to  reality  that  his  influence  is  necessary  to  de- 
velop woman  to  real  womanhood;  it  is  be- 
cause the  two  sexes  complete  each  other  men- 
tally as  well  as  physiologically  that  no  modern 
civilisation  has  been  really  rich  or  deep,  or 
stimulating  to  other  civilisations,  which  has 
not  been  based  on  the  recognised  interaction 
of  influences  between  men  and  women. 

There  are  several  ways  in  which  the 
Frenchwoman's  relations  with  men  may  be 
called  more  important  than  those  of  her  Amer- 
ican sister.  In  the  first  place,  in  the  commer- 
cial class,  the  Frenchwoman  is  always  her 
husband's  business  partner.  The  lives  of  the 
French  bourgeois  couple  are  basea  on  the  pri- 
mary necessity  of  getting  enough  money  to  live 
on,  and  of  giving  their  children  educational 
and  material  advantages.  In  small  businesses 
the  woman  is  always  her  husband's  book- 
keeper or  clerk,  or  both;  above  all,  she  is  his 
business  adviser.    France,  as  you  know,  is  held 


I04  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

up  to  all  other  countries  as  a  model  of  thrift, 
of  wise  and  prudent  saving  and  spending.  No 
other  country  in  the  world  has  such  immense 
financial  vitality,  such  powers  of  recuperation 
from  national  calamity.  After  the  Franco- 
Prussian  war  of  1870,  when  France,  beaten  to 
earth,  her  armies  lost,  half  her  territory  occu- 
pied, and  with  all  Europe  holding  aloof,  and 
not  a  single  ally  to  defend  her  interests — when 
France  was  called  on  by  her  conquerors  to  pay 
an  indemnity  of  five  thousand  million  francs 
in  order  to  free  her  territory  of  the  enemy,  she 
raised  the  sum,  and  paid  it  ofiF,  eighteen 
months  sooner  than  the  date  agreed  upon:  to 
the  rage  and  disappointment  of  Germany,  and 
the  amazement  and  admiration  of  the  rest  of 
the  world. 

Every  economist  knows  that  if  France  was 
able  to  make  that  incredible  effort  it  was  be- 
cause, all  over  the  country,  millions  of  French- 
women, labourers'  wives,  farmers'  wives,  small 
shopkeepers'  wives,  wives  of  big  manufactur- 
ers and  commission-merchants  and  bankers, 


The  New  Frenchwoman         105 

were  to  all  intents  and  purposes  their  hus- 
bands' business-partners,  and  had  had  a  direct 
interest  in  saving  and  investing  the  millions 
and  millions  piled  up  to  pay  France's  ransom 
in  her  day  of  need.  At  every  stage  in  French 
history,  in  war,  in  politics,  in  literature,  in  art 
and  in  religion,  women  have  played  a  splen- 
did and  a  decisive  part;  but  none  more  splen- 
did or  more  decisive  than  the  obscure  part 
played  by  the  millions  of  wives  and  mothers 
whose  thrift  and  prudence  silently  built  up 
her  salvation  in  1872. 

When  it  is  said  that  the  Frenchwoman  of 
the  middle  class  is  her  husband's  business 
partner  the  statement  must  not  be  taken  in  too 
literal  a  sense.  The  French  wife  has  less  le- 
gal independence  than  the  American  or  Eng- 
lish wife,  and  is  subject  to  a  good  many  legal 
disqualifications  from  which  women  have 
freed  themselves  in  other  countries.  That  is 
the  technical  situation;  but  what  is  the  prac- 
tical fact?  That  the  Frenchwoman  has  gone 
straight  through  these  theoretical  restrictions 


io6  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

to  the  heart  of  reality,  and  become  her  hus- 
band's associate,  because,  for  her  children's 
sake  if  not  for  her  own,  her  heart  is  in  his  job, 
and  because  he  has  long  since  learned  that 
the  best  business  partner  a  man  can  have  is  one 
who  has  the  same  interests  at  stake  as  himself. 
It  is  not  only  because  she  saves  him  a  sales- 
man's salary,  or  a  book-keeper'  salary,  or  both, 
that  the  French  tradesman  associates  his  wife 
with  his  business;  it  is  because  he  has  the  sense 
to  see  that  no  hired  assistant  will  have  so  keen 
a  perception  of  his  interests,  that  none  will  re- 
ceive his  customers  so  pleasantly,  and  that 
none  will  so  patiently  and  willingly  work  over 
hours  when  it  is  necessary  to  do  so.  There  is 
no  drudgery  in  this  kind  of  partnership,  be- 
cause it  is  voluntary,  and  because  each  part- 
ner is  stimulated  by  exactly  the  same  aspira- 
tions. And  it  is  this  practical,  personal  and 
daily  participation  in  her  husband's  job  that 
makes  the  Frenchwoman  more  grown  up  than 
others.     She  has  a  more  interesting  and  more 


The  New  Frenchwoman         107 

living  life,  and  therefore  she  develops  more 
quickly. 

It  may  be  objected  that  money-making  is 
not  the  most  interesting  thing  in  life,  and  that 
the  "higher  ideals"  seem  to  have  little  place 
in  this  conception  of  feminine  efficiency.  The 
answer  to  such  a  criticism  is  to  be  found  by 
considering  once  more  the  difiference  be- 
tween the  French  and  the  American  views  as 
to  the  main  object  of  money-making — a  point 
to  which  any  study  of  the  two  races  inevitably 
leads  one  back. 

Americans  are  too  prone  to  consider  money- 
making  as  interesting  in  itself:  they  regard 
the  fact  that  a  man  has  made  money  as  some- 
thing intrinsically  meritorious.  But  money- 
making  is  interesting  only  in  proportion  as  its 
object  is  interesting.  If  a  man  piles  up  mil- 
lions in  order  to  pile  them  up,  having  already 
all  he  needs  to  live  humanly  and  decently,  his 
occupation  is  neither  interesting  in  itself,  nor 
conducive  to  any  sort  of  real  social  develop- 
ment in  the  money-maker  or  in  those  about 


io8  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

him.  No  life  is  more  sterile  than  one  into 
which  nothing  enters  to  balance  such  an  out- 
put of  energy.  To  see  how  different  is  the 
French  view  of  the  object  of  money-making 
one  must  put  one's  self  in  the  place  of  the 
average  French  household.  For  the  immense 
majority  of  the  French  it  is  a  far  more  modest 
ambition,  and  consists  simply  in  the  effort  to 
earn  one's  living  and  put  by  enough  for  sick- 
ness, old  age,  and  a  good  start  in  life  for  the 
children. 

This  conception  of  ''business"  may  seem  a 
tame  one  to  Americans ;  but  its  adv^i.ntages  are 
worth  considering.  In  the  first  place,  it  has 
the  immense  superiority  of  leaving  time  for 
living,  time  for  men  and  women  both.  The 
average  French  business  man  at  the  end  of  his 
life  may  not  have  made  as  much  money  as  the 
American ;  but  meanwhile  he  has  had,  every 
day,  something  the  American  has  not  had: 
Time.  Time,  in  the  middle  of  the  day,  to  sit 
down  to  an  excellent  luncheon,  to  eat  it  quietly 
with  his  family,  and  to  read  his  paper  after- 


The  New  Frenchwoman         109 

ward ;  time  to  go  off  on  Sundays  and  holidays 
on  long  pleasant  country  rambles;  time,  al- 
most any  day,  to  feel  fresh  and  free  enough 
for  an  evening  at  the  theatre,  after  a  dinner  as 
good  and  leisurely  as  his  luncheon.  And  there 
is  one  thing  certain :  the  great  mass  of  men  and 
women  grow  up  andreach  real  maturity  only 
through  their  contact  with  the  material  reali- 
ties of  living,  with  business,  with  industry, 
with  all  the  great  bread-winning  activities; 
but  the  growth  and  the  maturing  take  place 
in  the  intervals  between  these  activities:  and 
in  lives  where  there  are  no  such  intervals  there 
will  be  no  real  growth. 

That  is  why  the  *'slow"  French  business 
methods  so  irritating  to  the  American  busi- 
ness man  produce,  in  the  long  run,  results 
which  he  is  often  the  first  to  marvel  at  and 
admire.  Every  intelligent  American  who  has 
seen  something  of  France  and  French  life  has 
had  a  first  moment  of  bewilderment  on  trying 
to  explain  the  seeming  contradiction  between 
the   slow,    fumbling,    timid   French   business 


no  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

methods  and  the  rounded  completeness  of 
French  civilisation.  How  is  it  that  a  country 
which  seems  to  have  almost  everything  to 
learn  in  the  way  of  "up-to-date"  business  has 
almost  everything  to  teach,  not  only  in  the 
way  of  art  and  literature,  and  all  the  graces  of 
life,  but  also  in  the  way  of  municipal  order, 
state  administration,  agriculture,  forestry,  en- 
gineering, and  the  whole  harmonious  running 
of  the  vast  national  machine?  The  answer  is 
the  last  the  American  business  man  is  likely  to 
think  of  until  he  has  had  time  to  study  France 
somewhat  closely:  it  is  that  France  is  what  she 
is  because  every  Frenchman  and  every  French- 
woman takes  time  to  live,  and  has  an  extraor- 
dinarily clear  and  sound  sense  of  what  consti- 
tutes real  living. 

We  are  too  ready  to  estimate  business  suc- 
cesses by  their  individual  results:  a  point  of 
view  revealed  in  our  national  awe  of  large 
fortunes.  That  is  an  immature  and  even 
childish  way  of  estimating  success.  In  terms 
of  civilisation  it  is  the  total  and  ultimate  re- 


The  New  Frenchwoman         hi 

suit  of  a  nation's  business  effort  that  matters, 
not  the  fact  of  Mr.  Smith's  being  able  to  build 
a  marble  villa  in  place  of  his  wooden  cottage. 
If  the  collective  life  which  results  from  our 
individual  money-making  is  not  richer,  more 
interesting  and  more  stimulating  than  that  of 
countries  where  the  .individual  effort  is  less 
intense,  then  it  looks  as  if  there  were  some- 
thing wrong  about  our  method. 

This  parenthesis  may  seem  to  have  wan- 
dered rather  far  from  the  Frenchwoman  who 
heads  the  chapter;  but  in  reality  she  is  at  its 
very  heart.  For  if  Frenchmen  care  too  much 
about  other  things  to  care  as  much  as  we  do 
about  making  money,  the  chief  reason  is 
largely  because  their  relations  with  women  are 
more  interesting.  The  Frenchwoman  rules 
French  life,  and  she  rules  it  under  a  triple 
crown,  as  a  business  woman,  as  a  mother,  and 
above  all  as  an  artist.  To  explain  the  sense  in 
which  the  last  word  is  used  it  is  necessary  to 
go  back  to  the  contention  that  the  greatness 
of  France  lies  in  her  sense  of  the  beauty  and 


112  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

importance  of  living.  As  life  is  an  art  in 
France,  so  woman  is  an  artist  She  does  not 
teach  man,  but  she  inspires  him.  As  the 
Frenchwoman  of  the  bread-winning  class  in- 
fluences her  husband,  and  inspires  in  him  a 
respect  for  her  judgment  and  her  wishes,  so 
the  Frenchwoman  of  the  rich  and  educated 
class  is  admired  and  held  in  regard  for  other 
qualities.  But  in  this  class  of  society  her  influ- 
ence naturally  extends  much  farther.  The  more 
civilised  a  society  is,  the  wider  is  the  range  of 
each  woman's  influence  over  men,  and  of  each 
man's  influence  over  women.  Intelligent  and 
cultivated  people  of  either  sex  will  never  lim- 
it themselves  to  communing  with  their  own 
households.  Men  and  women  equally,  when 
they  have  the  range  of  interests  that  real  cul- 
tivation gives,  need  the  stimulus  of  different 
points  of  view,  the  refreshment  of  new  ideas 
as  well  as  of  new  faces.  The  long  hypocrisy 
which  Puritan  England  handed  on  to  Amer- 
ica concerning  the  danger  of  frank  and  free 
social  relations  between  men  and  women  has 


The  New  Frenchwoman         ii-^ 

done  more  than  anything  else  to  retard  real 
civilisation  in  America. 

Real  civilisation  means  an  education  that 
extends  to  the  whole  of  life,  in  contradistinc- 
tion to  that  of  school  or  college:  it  means  an 
education  that  forms  speech,  forms  manners, 
forms  taste,  forms  ideals,  and  above  all  forms 
judgment.  This  is  the  kind  of  civilisation  of 
which  France  has  always  been  the  foremost 
model:  it  is  because  she  possesses  its  secret 
that  she  has  led  the  world  so  long  not  only  in 
art  and  taste  and  elegance,  but  in  ideas  and  in 
ideals.  For  it  must  never  be  forgotten  that  if 
the  fashion  of  our  note-paper  and  the  cut  of 
our  dresses  come  from  France,  so  do  the  con- 
ceptions of  liberty  and  justice  on  which  our 
republican  institutions  are  based.  No  nation 
can  have  grown-up  ideas  till  it  has  a  ruling 
caste  of  grown-up  men  and  women;  and  it 
is  possible  to  have  a  ruling  caste  of  grown-up 
men  and  women  only  in  a  civilisation  where 
the  power  of  each  sex  is  balanced  by  that  of 
the  other. 


114  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

h        ■■-■■   ■  -  ■■  ■  ■  '-■■'■'        ,■.■——: —  ; 

It  may  seem  strange  to  draw  precisely  this 
comparison  between  France,  the  country  of  all 
the  old  sex-conventions,  and  America,  which  is 
supposedly  the  country  of  the  greatest  sex- 
freedom;  and  the  American  reader  may  ask: 
"But  where  is  there  so  much  freedom  of  in- 
tercourse between  men  and  women  as  in 
America?"  The  misconception  arises  from 
the  confusion  between  two  words,  and  two 
states  of  being  that  are  fundamentally  differ- 
ent. In  America  there  is  complete  freedom 
of  intercourse  between  boys  and  girls,  but  not 
between  men  and  women;  and  there  is  a  gen- 
eral notion  that,  in  essentials,  a  girl  and  a 
woman  are  the  same  thing.  It  is  true,  in  es- 
sentials, that  a  boy  and  a  man  are  very  much 
the  same  thing;  but  a  girl  and  a  woman — a 
married  woman — are  totally  different  beings. 
Marriage,  union  with  a  man,  completes  and 
transforms  a  woman's  character,  her  point  of 
view,  her  sense  of  the  relative  importance  of 
things,  far  more  thoroughly  than  a  boy's  na- 
ture is  changed  by  the  same  experience.     A 


The  New  Frenchwoman         115 

girl  is  only  a  sketch;  a  married  woman  is  the 
finished  picture.  And  it  is  only  the  married 
woman  who  counts  as  a  social  factor. 

Now  it  is  precisely  at  the  moment  when  her 
experience  is  rounded  by  marriage,  mother- 
hood, and  the  responsibilities,  cares  and  inter- 
ests of  her  own  household,  that  the  average 
American  woman  is,  so  to  speak,  "withdrawn 
from  circulation."  It  is  true  that  this  does 
not  apply  to  the  small  minority  of  wealthy 
and  fashionable  women  who  lead  an  artificial 
cosmopolitan  life,  and  therefore  represent  no 
particular  national  tendency.  It  is  not  to  them 
that  the  country  looks  for  the  development 
of  its  social  civilisation,  but  to  the  average 
woman  who  is  sufficiently  free  from  bread- 
winning  cares  to  act  as  an  incentive  to  other 
women  and  as  an  influence  upon  men.  In 
America  this  woman,  in  the  immense  major- 
ity of  cases,  has  roamed  through  life  in  abso- 
lute freedom  of  communion  with  young  men 
until  the  day  when  the  rounding-out  of  her 
own  experience  by  marriage  puts  her  in  a  po- 


ii6  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

sition  to  become  a  social  influence;  and  from 
that  day  she  is  cut  off  from  men's  society  in  all 
but  the  most  formal  and  intermittent  ways. 
On  her  wedding-day  she  ceases,  in  any  open, 
frank  and  recognised  manner,  to  be  an  in- 
fluence in  the  lives  of  the  men  of  the  com- 
munity to  which  she  belongs. 

In  France,  the  case  is  just  the  contrary. 
France,  hitherto,  has  kept  young  girls  under 
restrictions  at  which  Americans  have  often 
smiled,  and  which  have  certainly,  in  some  re- 
spects, been  a  bar  to  their  growth.  The  do- 
ing away  of  these  restrictions  will  be  one  of 
the  few  benefits  of  the  war:  the  French  young 
girl,  even  in  the  most  exclusive  and  most  tra- 
dition-loving society,  will  never  again  be  the 
prisoner  she  has  been  in  the  past.  But  this  is 
relatively  unimportant,  for  the  French  have 
always  recognised  that,  as  a  social  factor,  a 
woman  does  not  count  till  she  is  married;  and 
in  the  well-to-do  classes  girls  marry  extremely 
young,  and  the  married  woman  has  always  had 
extraordinary  social   freedom.     The  famous 


The  New  Frenchwoman         117 

»  — 

French  "Salon,"  the  best  school  of  talk  and  of 
ideas  that  the  modern  world  has  known,  was 
based  on  the  belief  that  the  most  stimulating 
conversation  in  the  world  is  that  between  intel- 
ligent men  and  women  who  see  each  other  of- 
ten enough  to  be  on  terms  of  frank  and  easy 
friendship.  The  great  wave  of  intellectual 
and  social  liberation  that  preceded  the  French 
revolution  and  prepared  the  way,  not  for.  its 
horrors  but  for  its  benefits,  originated  in  the 
drawing-rooms  of  French  wives  and  mothers, 
who  received  every  day  the  most  thoughtful 
and  the  most  brilliant  men  of  the  time,  who 
shared  their  talk,  and  often  directed  it.  Think 
what  an  asset  to  the  mental  life  of  any  country 
such  a  group  of  women  forms!  And  in 
France  they  were  not  then,  and  they  are  not 
now,  limited  to  the  small  class  of  the  wealthy, 
and  fashionable.  In  France,  as  soon  as  a  wo- 
man has  a  personality,  social  circumstances 
permit  her  to  make  it  felt.  What  docs  it  mat- 
ter if  she  had  spent  her  girlhood  in  seclusion, 
provided  she  is  free  to  emerge  from  it  at  the 


ii8  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

moment  when  she  is  fitted  to  become  a  real 
factor  in  social  life? 

It  may,  of  course,  be  asked  at  this  point, 
how  the  French  freedom  of  intercourse  be- 
tween married  men  and  women  afTects  domes- 
tic life,  and  the  happiness  of  a  woman's  hus- 
band and  children.  It  is  hard  to  say  what 
kind  of  census  could  be  devised  to  ascertain 
the  relative  percentage  of  happy  marriages  in 
the  countries  where  different  social  systems 
prevail.  Until  such  a  census  can  be  taken,  it 
is,  at  any  rate,  rash  to  assert  that  the  French 
system  is  less  favourable  to  domestic  happi- 
ness than  the  Anglo-Saxon.  At  any  rate,  it 
acts  as  a  greater  incentive  to  the  husband,  since 
it  rests  with  him  to  keep  his  wife's  admiration 
and  affection  by  making  himself  so  agreeable 
to  her,  and  by  taking  so  much  trouble  to  ap- 
pear at  an  advantage  in  the  presence  of  her 
men  friends,  that  no  rival  shall  supplant  him. 
It  would  not  occur  to  any  Frenchman  of  the 
cultivated  class  to  object  to  his  wife's  friend- 
ship with  other  men,  and  the  mere  fact  that 


The  New  Frenchwoman         119 

he  has  the  influence  of  other  men  to  compete 
with  is  likely  to  conduce  to  considerate  treat- 
ment of  his  wife,  and  courteous  relations  in 
the  household. 

It  must  also  be  remembered  that  a  m^in  who 
comes  home  to  a  wife  who  has  been  talking 
with  intelligent  men  will  probably  find  her 
companionship  more  stimulating  than  if  she 
has  spent  all  her  time  with  other  women.  No 
matter  how  intelligent  women  are  individ- 
ually, they  tend,  collectively,  to  narrow  down 
their  interests,  and  take  a  feminine,  or  even  a 
female,  rather  than  a  broadly  human  view  of 
things.  The  woman  whose  mind  is  attuned 
to  men's  minds  has  a  much  larger  view  of  the 
world,  and  attaches  much  less  importance  to 
trifles,  because  men,  being  usually  brought  by 
circumstances  into  closer  contact  with  reality, 
insensibly  communicate  their  breadth  of  view 
to  women.  A  "man's  woman"  is  never  fussy 
and  seldom  spiteful,  because  she  breathes  too 
free  an  air,  and  is  having  too  good  a  time. 

If,  then,  being  "grown  up"  consists  in  hav- 


I20  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

ing  a  larger  and  more  liberal  experience  of 
life,  in  being  less  concerned  with  trifles,  and 
less  afraid  of  strong  feelings,  passions  and 
risks,  then  the  French  woman  is  distinctly 
more  grown  up  than  her  American  sister;  and 
she  is  so  because  she  plays  a  much  larger  and 
more  interesting  part  in  men's  lives. 

It  may,  of  course,  also  be  asked  whether  the 
fact  of  playing  this  part — ^which  implies  all 
the  dangers  implied  by  taking  the  open  seas 
instead  of  staying  in  port — whether  such  a 
fact  is  conducive  to  the  eventual  welfare  of 
woman  and  of  society.  Well — the  answer  to- 
day is:  France!  Look  at  her  as  she  has  stood 
before  the  world  for  the  last  four  years  and  a 
half,  uncomplaining,  undiscouraged,  un- 
daunted, holding  up  the  banner  of  liberty: 
liberty  of  speech,  liberty  of  thought,  liberty 
of  conscience,  all  the  liberties  that  we  of  the 
western  world  have  been  taught  to  revere  as 
the  only  things  worth  living  for — look  at  her, 
as  the  world  has  beheld  her  since  August, 
1914,  fearless,  tearless,  indestructible,  in  face 


The  New  Frenchwoman         121 

of  the  most  ruthless  and  formidable  enemy  the 
world  has  ever  known,  determined  to  fight  on 
to  the  end  for  the  principles  she  has  always 
lived  for.  Such  she  is  to-day;  such  are  the 
millions  of  men-  who  have  spent  their  best 
years  in  her  trenches,  and  the  millions  of 
brave,  uncomplaining,  self-denying  mothers 
and  wives  and  sisters  who  sent  them  forth 
smiling,  who  waited  for  them  patiently  and 
courageously,  or  who  are  mourning  them  si- 
lently and  unflinchingly,  and  not  one  of  whom, 
at  the  end  of  the  most  awful  struggle  in  his- 
tory, is  ever  heard  to  say  that  the  cost  has  been 
too  great  or  the  trial  too  bitter  to  be  borne. 

No  one  who  has  seen  Frenchwomen  since 
the  war  can  doubt  that  their  great  influence 
on  French  life,  French  thought,  French  imag- 
ination and  French  sensibility,  is  one  of  the 
strongest  elements  in  the  attitude  that  France 
holds  before  the  world  to-day. 


VII 
IN  CONCLUSION 


ONE  of  the  best  ways  of  finding  out 
why  a  race  is  what  it  is,  is  to  pick  out 
the  words  that  preponderate  in  its 
speech  and  its  literature,  and  then*  try  to  define 
the  special  meaning  it  gives  them. 

The  French  people  are  one  of  the  most 
ascetic  and  the  most  laborious  in  Europe; 
yet  the  four  words  that  preponderate  in 
French  speech  and  literature  are:  Glory,  love, 
voluptuousness,  and  pleasure.  Before  the 
Puritan  reflex  causes  the  reader  to  fling  aside 
the  page  polluted  by  this  statement,  it  will  be 
worth  his  while  to  translate  these  four  words 
into  la  gloire,  I'amour,  la  volupte,  le  plaisir, 
and  then  (if  he  knows  French  and  the  French 
well  enough)  consider  what  they  mean  in  the 


Conclusion  123 


language  of  Corneille  and  Pascal.  For  it 
must  be  understood  that  they  have  no  equiva- 
lents in  the  English  consciousness,  and  that,  if 
it  were  sought  to  explain  the  fundamental  dif- 
ference between  the  exiles  of  the  Mayflower 
and  the  conquerors  of  Valmy  and  Jena,  it 
would  probably  best  be  illustrated  by  the  to- 
tally different  significance  of  "love  and  glory" 
and  "amour  et  gloire." 

To  begin  with  "la  gloire":  we  must  resign 
ourselves  to  the  fact  that  we  do  not  really 
know  what  the  French  mean  when  they  say 
it — what,  for  instance,  Montesquieu  had  in 
mind  when  he  wrote  of  Sparta:  "The  only 
object  of  the  Lacedaemonians  was  liberty,  the 
only  advantage  it  gave  them  was  glory."  At 
best,  if  we  are  intelligent  and  sympathetic 
enough  to  have  entered  a  little  way  into  the 
French  psychology,  we  know  that  they  mean 
something  infinitely  larger,  deeper  and  sub- 
tler than  we  mean  by  "glory."  The  proof  is 
that  the  Anglo-Saxon  is  taught  not  to  do  great 
deeds  for  "glory,"  while  the  French,  unsur- 


124  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

i         ■  ■  '  .  ■■     , 

passed  in  great  deeds,  have  always  avowedly 
done  them  for  "la  gloire." 

It  is  obvious  that  the  sense  of  duty  has  a 
large  part  in  the  French  conception  of  glory: 
perhaps  one  might  risk  defining  it  as  duty  with 
a  panache.  But  that  only  brings  one  to  an- 
other untranslatable  word.  To  put  a  panache 
— a  plume,  an  ornament — on  a  prosaic  deed  is 
an  act  so  eminently  French  that  one  seeks  in 
vain  for  its  English.equivalent;  it  would  verge 
on  the  grotesque  to  define  "la  gloire"  as  duty 
wearing  an  aigrette!  The  whole  conception 
of  "la  gloire"  is  linked  with  the  profoundly 
French  conviction  that  the  lily  should  be 
gilded;  that,  however  lofty  and  beautiful  a 
man's  act  or  his  purpose,  it  gains  by  being  per- 
formed with  what  the  French  (in  a  word 
which  for  them  has  no  implication  of  effemi- 
nacy) call  "elegance."  Indeed,  the  higher, 
the  more  beautiful,  the  gesture  or  the  act,  the 
more  it  seems  to  them  to  call  for  adornment, 
the  more  it  gains  by  being  given  relief.  And 
thus,  by  the  very  appositeness  of  the  word 


Conclusion  125 


relief,  one  is  led  to  perceive  that  "la  gloire"  as 
an  incentive  to  high  action  is  essentially  the 
conception  of  a  people  in  whom  the  plastic 
sense  has  always  prevailed.  The  idea  of  "dy- 
ing in  beauty"  certainly  originated  with  the 
Latin  race,  though  a  Scandinavian  play- 
wright was  left,  incongruously  enough,  to  find 
a  phrase  for  it. 

The  case  is  the  same  with  "love"  and 
''amour";  but  here  the  difference  is  more  visi- 
ble, and  the  meaning  of  "amour"  easier  to 
arrive  at.  Again,  as  with  "gloire,"  the  con- 
tent is  greater  than  that  of  our  "love." 
"Amour,"  to  the  French,  means  the  undivided 
total  of  the  complex  sensations  and  emotions 
that  a  man  and  a  woman  may  inspire  in  each 
other;  whereas  "love,"  since  the  days  of  the 
Elizabethans,  has  never,  to  Anglo-Saxons, 
been  more  than  two  halves  of  a  word — one 
half  all  purity  and  poetry,  the  other  all  pruri- 
ency and  prose.  And  gradually  the  latter  half 
has  been  discarded,  as  too  unworthy  of  asso- 
ciation with  the  loftier  meanings  of  the  word, 


126  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

and  "love"  remains — at  least  in  the  press  and 
in  the  household — a  relation  as  innocuous,  and 
as  undisturbing  to  social  conventions  and  busi- 
ness routine,  as  the  tamest  ties  of  consan- 
guinity. 

Is  it  not  possible  that  the  determination  to 
keep  these  two  halves  apart  has  diminished 
the  one  and  degraded  the  other,  to  the  loss  of 
human  nature  in  the  round?  The  Anglo- 
Saxon  answer  is,  of  course,  that  love  is  not  li- 
cense; but  what  meaning  is  left  to  "love"  in  a 
society  where  it  is  supposed  to  determine  mar- 
riage, and  yet  to  ignore  the  transiency  of  sex- 
ual attraction?  At  best,  it  seems  to  designate 
a  boy-and-girl  fancy  not  much  more  mature 
than  a  taste  for  dolls  or  marbles.  In  the  light 
of  that  definition,  has  not  license  kept  the  bet- 
ter part? 

It  may  be  argued  that  human  nature  is  ev- 
erywhere fundamentally  the  same,  and  that, 
though  one  race  lies  about  its  deepest  impulses, 
while  another  speaks  the  truth  about  them,  the 
result  in   conduct  is  not  very  different     Is 


Conclusion  i  27 


either  of  these  affirmations  exact?  If  human 
nature,  at  bottom,  is  everywhere  the  same,  such 
deep  layers  of  different  habits,  prejudices,  and 
beliefs  have  been  formed  above  its  founda- 
tion that  it  is  rather  misleading  to  test  resem- 
blances by  what  one  digs  up  at  the  roots.  Sec- 
ondary motives  of  conduct  are  widely  diver- 
gent in  different  countries,  and  they  are  the 
motives  that  control  civilised  societies  except 
when  some  catastrophe  throws  them  back  to 
the  state  of  naked  man. 

To  understand  the  difference  between  the 
Latin  and  the  Anglo-Saxon  idea  of  love  one 
must  first  of  all  understand  the  difference  be- 
tween the  Latin  and  Anglo-Saxon  conceptions 
of  marriage.  In  a  society  where  marriage  is 
supposed  to  be  determined  solely  by  recipro- 
cal inclination,  and  to  bind  the  contracting 
parties  not  only  to  a  social  but  to  a  physical 
lifelong  loyalty,  love,  which  never  has  ac- 
cepted, and  never  will  accept,  such  bonds,  im- 
mediately becomes  a  pariah  and  a  sinner. 
This  is  the  Anglo-Saxon  point  of  view.    How 


128  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 
■ 

many  critics  of  the  French  conception  of  love 
have  taken  the  trouble  to  consider  first  their 
idea  of  marriage? 

Marriage,  in  France,  is  regarded  as 
founded  for  the  family  and  not  for  the  hus- 
band and  wife.  It  is  designed  not  to  make  two 
people  individually  happy  for  a  longer  or 
shorter  time,  but  to  secure  their  permanent 
well-being  as  associates  in  the  foundation  of 
a  home  and  the  procreation  of  a  family.  Such 
an  arrangement  must  needs  be  based  on  what 
is  most  permanent  in  human  states  of  feeling, 
and  least  dependent  on  the  accidents  of  beauty, 
youth,  and  novelty.  Community  of  tradition, 
of  education,  and,  above  all,  of  the  parental 
feeling,  are  judged  to  be  the  sentiments  most 
likely  to  form  a  lasting  tie  between  the  aver- 
age man  and  woman;  and  the  French  mar- 
riage is  built  on  parenthood,  not  on  passion. 

An  illustration  of  the  radical  contradiction 
between  such  a  view  of  marriage  and  that  of 
the  English  races  is  found  in  the  following  ex- 


Conclusion  129 


tract  from  a  notice  of  a  play  lately  produced 
(with  success)  in  London: 

"After  two  months  of  marriage  a  young  girl 
discovers  that  her  husband  married  her  be- 
cause he  wanted  a  son.  That  is  enough.  She 
will  have  no  more  to  do  with  him.  So  he  goes 
off  to  fulfil  a  mining  engagement  in  Peru,  and 
she  hides  herself  in  the  country.    .    .    ." 

It  would  be  impossible  to  exaggerate  the  be- 
wilderment and  disgust  with  which  any  wife 
or  husband  in  France,  whether  young  or  mid- 
dle-aged, would  read  the  cryptic  sentences  I 
have  italicised.  "What,"  they  would  ask, 
"did  the  girl  suppose  he  had  married  her  for? 
And  what  did  she  want  to  be  married  for? 
And  what  is  marriage  for,  if  not  for  that?" 

The  French  bride  is  no  longer  taken  from 
a  convent  at  sixteen  to  be  flung  into  the  arms 
of  an  unknown  bridegroom.  As  emancipa- 
tion has  progressed,  the  young  girl  has  been 
allowed  a  voice  in  choosing  her  husband;  but 
what  is  the  result?  That  in  ninety-nine  cases 
out  of  a  hundred  her  choice  is  governed  by  the 


I30  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

same  considerations.  The  notion  of  marriage 
as  a  kind  of  superior  business  association, 
based  on  community  of  class,  of  political  and 
religious  opinion,  and  on  a  fair  exchange  of 
advantages  (where  one,  for  instance,  brings 
money  and  the  other  position),  is  so  ingrained 
in  the  French  social  organisation  that  the  mod- 
ern girl  accepts  it  intelligently,  just  as  her 
puppet  grandmother  bowed  to  it  passively. 

From  this  important  act  of  life  the  notion 
of  love  is  tacitly  excluded;  not  because  love  is 
thought  unimportant,  but  on  account  of  its 
very  importance,  and  of  the  fact  that  it  is  not 
conceivably  to  be  fitted  into  any  stable  asso- 
ciation between  man  and  woman.  It  is  be- 
cause the  French  have  refused  to  cut  love  in 
two  that  they  have  not  attempted  to  subordi- 
nate it  to  the  organisation  of  the  family.  They 
have  left  it  out  because  there  was  no  room  for 
it,  and  also  because  it  moves  to  a  different 
rhythm,  and  keeps  different  seasons.  It  is  be- 
cause they  refuse  to  regard  it  either  as  merely 
an  exchange  of  ethereal  vows  or  as  a  sensual 


Conclusion  131 


gratification;  because,  on  the  contrary,  they 
believe,  with  Coleridge,  that 

"All  thoughts,  all  passions,  all  delights, 
Whatever  stirs  this  mortal  frame, 
All  are  but  ministers  of  Love, 
And  feed  his  sacred  flame," 

that  they  frankly  recognise  its  right  to  its  own 
place  in  life. 

What,  then,  is  the  place  they  give  to  the  dis- 
/"urbing  element?  They  treat  it — the  answer 
might  be — as  ihe  poetry  of  life.  For  the 
French,  simply  because  they  are  the  most  real- 
istic people  in  the  world,  are  also  the  most  ro- 
mantic. They  have  judged  that  the  family 
and  the  state  cannot  be  built  up  on  poetry,  but 
they  have  not  felt  that  for  that  reason  poetry 
was  to  be  banished  from  their  republic.  They 
have  decided  that  love  is  too  grave  a  matter 
for  boys  and  girls,  and  not  grave  enough  to 
form  the  basis  of  marriage;  but  in  the  rela- 
tions between  grown  people,  apart  from  their 
permanent  ties  (and  in  the  deepest  conscious- 
ness of  the  French,  marriage  still  remains  in- 


132  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

dissoluble) ,  they  allow  it,  frankly  and  amply, 
the  part  it  furtively  and  shabbily,  but  no  less 
ubiquitously,  plays  in  Puritan  societies. 

It  is  not  intended  here  to  weigh  the  relative 
advantages  of  this  view  of  life  and  the  other; 
what  has  been  sought  is  to  state  fairly  the  rea- 
sons why  marriage,  being  taken  more  seriously 
and  less  vaguely  by  the  French,  there  remains 
an  allotted  place  for  love  in  their  more  pre- 
cisely ordered  social  economy.  Nevertheless, 
it  is  fairly  obvious  that,  except  in  a  world 
where  the  claims  of  the  body  social  are  very 
perfectly  balanced  against  those  of  the  body 
individual,  to  give  such  a  place  to  passion  is 
to  risk  being  submerged  by  it.  A  society 
which  puts  love  beyond  the  law,  and  then  pays 
it  such  heavy  toll,  subjects  itself  to  the  most 
terrible  of  Camorras. 

II 

The  French  are  one  of  the  most  ascetic  races 
in  the  world;  and  that  is  perhaps  the  reason 
why  the  meaning  they  give  to  the  word  ''vo- 


Conclusion  133 


lupte"  is  free  from  the  vulgarity  of  our  "vo- 
luptuousness." The  latter  suggests  to  most 
people  a  cross-legged  sultan  in  a  fat  seraglio; 
"volupte"  means  the  intangible  charm  that 
imagination  extracts  from  things  tangible. 
"Volupte"  means  the  "Ode  to  the  Nightin- 
gale" and  the  "Ode  to  a  Grecian  Urn;"  it 
means  Romeo  and  Juliet  as  well  as  Antony 
and  Cleopatra.  But  if  we  have  the  thing,  one 
may  ask,  what  does  the  word  matter?  Every 
language  is  always  losing  word-values,  even 
where  the  sense  of  the  word  survives. 

The  answer  is  that  the  French  sense  of 
"volupte"  is  found  only  exceptionally  in  the 
Anglo-Saxon  imagination,  whereas  it  is  part 
of  the  imaginative  make-up  of  the  whole 
French  race.  One  turns  to  Shakespeare  or 
Keats  to  find  it  formulated  in  our  speech; 
in  France  it  underlies  the  whole  view  of  life. 
And  this  brings  one,  of  course,  to  the  inevi- 
table conclusion  that  the  French  are  a  race  of 
creative  artists,  and  that  artistic  creativcness 
requires  first  a  free  play  of  the  mind  on  all 


134  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

the  facts  of  life,  and  secondly  the  sensuous  sen- 
sibility that  sees  beyond  tangible  beauty  to  the 
aura  surrounding  it. 

The  French  possess  the  quality  and  have  al- 
ways claimed  the  privilege.  And  from  their 
freedom  of  view  combined  with  their  sensu- 
ous sensibility  they  have  extracted  the  sensa- 
tion they  call  "le  plaisir,"  which  is  something 
so  much  more  definite  and  more  evocative 
than  what  we  mean  when  we  speak  of  pleas- 
ure. "Le  plaisir"  stands  for  the  frankly  per- 
mitted, the  freely  taken,  delight  of  the  senses, 
the  direct  enjoyment  of  the  fruit  of  the  tree 
called  golden.  No  suggestions  of  furtive  vice 
degrade  or  coarsen  it,  because  it  has,  like  love, 
its  open  place  in  speech  and  practice.  It  has 
found  its  expression  in  English  also,  but  only 
on  the  lips  of  genius:  for  instance,  in  the 
''bursting  of  joy's  grape"  in  the  "Ode  to 
Melancholy"  (it  is  always  in  Keats  that  one 
seeks  such  utterances)  ;  whereas  to  the  French 
it  is  part  of  the  general  fearless  and  joyful  con- 
tact with  life.    And  that  is  why  it  has  kept  its 


Conclusion  135 


finer  meaning,  instead  of  being  debased  by  in- 
comprehension. 

Ill 

The  French  are  passionate  and  pleasure- 
loving;  but  they  are  above  all  ascetic  and  la- 
borious. And  it  is  only  out  of  a  union  of 
these  supposedly  contradictory  qualities  that 
so  fine  a  thing  as  the  French  temperament 
could  have  come. 

The  industry  of  the  French  is  universally 
celebrated;  but  many — even  among  their  own 
race — might  ask  what  justifies  the  statement 
that  they  are  ascetic.  The  fact  is,  the  word, 
which  in  reality  indicates  merely  a  natural  in- 
difference to  material  well-being,  has  come, 
in  modern  speech,  to  have  a  narrower  and  a 
penitential  meaning.  It  is  supposed  to  imply 
a  moral  judgment,  whereas  it  refers  only  to 
the  attitude  taken  toward  the  creature  com- 
forts. A  man,  or  a  nation,  may  wear  home- 
spun and  live  on  locusts,  and  yet  be  immod- 
eratelv  addicted  to  the  lusts  of  the  eve  and 


136  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

of  the  flesh.  Asceticism  means  the  serene 
ability  to  get  on  without  comfort,  and  comfort 
is  an  Anglo-Saxon  invention  which  the  Latins 
have  never  really  understood  or  felt  the  want 
of.  What  they  need  (and  there  is  no  relation 
between  the  needs)  is  splendour  on  occasion, 
^and  beauty  and  fulness  of  experience  always. 
They  do  not  care  for  the  raw  material  of  sen- 
sation: food  must  be  exquisitely  cooked,  emo- 
tion eloquently  expressed,  desire  emotionally 
heightened,  every  experience  must  be  trans- 
muted into  terms  of  beauty  before  it  touches 
their  imagination. 

This  fastidiousness,  this  tendency  always  to 
select  and  eliminate,  and  refine  their  sensa- 
tions, is  united  to  that  stoic  indifference  to 
dirt,  discomfort,  bad  air,  damp,  cold,  and 
whatever  Anglo-Saxons  describe  as  "incon- 
venience" in  the  general  organisation  of  life, 
from  the  bathroom  to  the  banking  system, 
which  gives  the  French  leisure  of  spirit  for 
enjoyment,  and  strength  of  heart  for  war.  It 
enables,  and  has  always  enabled,  a  people  ad- 


Conclusion  137 


dieted  to  pleasure  and  unused  to  the  disci- 
pline of  sport,  to  turn  at  a  moment's  notice 
into  the  greatest  fighters  that  history  has 
known.  All  the  French  need  to  effect  this 
transformation  is  a  "great  argument;"  once 
the  spring  of  imagination  touched,  the  body 
obeys  it  with  a  dash  and  an  endurance  that 
no  discipline,  whether  Spartan  or  Prussian, 
«ver  succeeded  in  outdoing. 

This  fearless  and  joyful  people,  so  ardently 
individual  and  so  frankly  realistic,  have  an- 
other safeguard  against  excess  in  their  almost 
Chinese  reverence  for  the  ritual  of  manners. 
It  is  fortunate  that  they  have  preserved, 
through  every  political  revolution,  this  sense 
of  the  importance  of  ceremony,  for  they  are 
without  the  compensating  respect  for  the 
rights  of  others  which  eases  intercourse  in 
Anglo-Saxon  countries.  Any  view  of  the 
French  that  considers  them  as  possessing  the 
instinct  of  liberty  is  misleading;  what  they 
have  always  understood  is  equality — a  differ- 
ent matter — and  even  that,  as  one  of  the  most 


138  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

acute  among  their  recent  political  writers  has 
said,  "on  condition  that  each  man  commands." 
Their  past  history,  and  above  all  the  geo- 
graphical situation  which  has  conditioned  it, 
must  be  kept  in  view  to  understand  the  French 
indifference  to  the  rights  of  others,  and  the 
corrective  for  that  indifference  which  their  ex- 
quisite sense  of  sociability  provides. 

For  over  a  thousand  years  France  has  had 
to  maintain  herself  in  the  teeth  of  an  aggres- 
sive Europe,  and  to  do  so  she  has  required  a 
strong  central  government  and  a  sense  of  so- 
cial discipline.  Her  great  kings  were  forever 
strengthening  her  by  their  resistance  to  the 
scattered  feudal  opposition.  Richelieu  and 
Louis  XIV  finally  broke  this  opposition,  and 
left  France  united  against  Europe,  but  de- 
prived of  the  sense  of  individual  freedom,  and 
needing  to  feel  the  pressure  of  an  ''administra- 
tion" on  her  neck.  Imagination,  intellectual 
energy,  and  every  form  of  artistic  activity, 
found  their  outlet  in  social  intercourse,  and 


Conclusion  139 

• -^ ■  r 

France  created  polite  society — one  more  work 
of  art  in  the  long  list  of  her  creations. 

The  French  conception  of  society  is  hierar- 
chical and  administrative,  as  her  government 
(under  whatever  name)  has  so  long  been. 
Every  social  situation  has  its  appropriate  ges- 
tures and  its  almost  fixed  vocabulary,  and 
nothing,  for  example,  is  more  puzzling  to 
the  French  than  the  fact  that  the  English,  a 
race  whose  civilisation  they  regard  as  in  some 
respects  superior  to  their  own,  have  only  two 
or  three  ways  of  beginning  and  ending  their 
letters. 

This  ritual  view  of  politeness  makes  it  dif- 
ficult of  application  in  undetermined  cases, 
and  therefore  it  often  gets  left  out  in  emer- 
gencies. The  complaint  of  Anglo-Saxons  that, 
in  travelling  in  France,  they  see  little  of  the 
much-vaunted  French  courtesy,  is  not  unjus- 
tified. The  French  are  not  courteous  from 
any  vague  sense  of  good-will  toward  mankind ; 
they  regard  politeness  as  a  coin  with  which 
certain  things  are  obtainable,  and  being  no- 


I40  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

tably  thrifty  they  are  cautious  about  spending 
it  on  strangers.  But  the  disillusion  of  the 
traveller  often  arises  in  part  from  his  own  ig- 
norance of  the  most  elementary  French  forms: 
of  the  "Bon  jour,  Madame,"  on  entering  and 
leaving  a  shop,  of  the  fact  that  a  visitor  should 
always,  on  taking  leave,  b^  conducted  to  the 
outer  door,  and  a  gentleman  (of  the  old 
school)  bidden  not  to  remain  uncovered  when 
he  stops  to  speak  to  a  lady  in  the  street;  of 
the  "Merci"  that  should  follow  every  service, 
however  slight,  the  "Apres  vous"  which  makes 
way,  wath  ceremonious  insistence,  for  the  per- 
son who  happens  to  be  entering  a  door  with 
one.  In  these  respects,  Anglo-Saxons,  by  their 
lack  of  ''form"  (and  their  lack  of  perception) , 
are  perpetually  giving  unintentional  ofifence. 
But  small  social  fashions  are  oddly  different 
in  different  countries  and  vary  absurdly  in  suc- 
ceeding generations.  The  French  gentleman 
does  not  uncover  in  a  lift  or  in  a  museum,  be- 
cause he  considers  these  places  as  public  as  the 
street;  he  does  not,  after  the  manner  of  the 


Conclusion  141 


newest-of-all  American,  jump  up  like  a  Jack- 
in-the-box  (and  remain  standing  at  attention) 
every  time  the  woman  he  is  calling  on  rises 
from  her  seat,  because  he  considers  such  gym- 
nastics fatal  to  social  ease;  but  he  is  shocked 
by  the  way  in  which  Americans  loll  and 
sprawl  when  they  arc  seated,  and  equally  be- 
wildered by  their  excess  of  ceremony  on  some 
occasions,  and  their  startling  familiarity  on 
others. 

Such  misunderstandings  are  inevitable  be- 
tween people  of  different  speech  and  tradi- 
tions. If  French  and  Americans  are  both  (as 
their  newspapers  assure  us)  "democratic,"  it 
gives  a  notion  of  how  much  the  term  covers! 
At  any  rate,  in  the  older  race  there  is  a  tradi- 
tion of  trained  and  cultivated  politeness  that 
flowers,  at  its  best,  into  a  simplicity  demo- 
cratic in  the  finest  sense.  Compared  to  it,  our 
politeness  is  apt  to  be  rather  stagy,  as  our  ease 
is  at  times  a  little  boorish. 


142  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

IV 

It  will  be  remembered  that  Paolo  and 
Francesca  are  met  by  Dante  just  beyond 
the  fatal  gateway,  in  what  might  be  called 
the  temperate  zone  of  the  infernal  regions. 
In  the  society  of  dangerously  agreeable  fel- 
low-sinners they  "go  forever  on  the  accursed 
air,"  telling  their  beautiful  tale  to  sympathise 
ing  visitors  from  above;  and  as,  unlike  thft 
majority  of  mortal  lovers,  they  seem  not  to 
dread  an  eternity  together,  and  as  they  feel 
no  exaggerated  remorse  for  their  sin,  their 
punishment  is  the  mildest  in  the  poet's  list  of 
expiations.  There  is  all  the  width  of  hell 
between  the  "Divine  Comedy"  and  the  "Scar- 
let Letter"! 

Far  different  is  the  lot  of  the  dishonest  man 
of  business  and  of  the  traitor  to  the  state.  For 
these  two  offenders  against  the  political  and 
social  order  the  ultimate  horrors  of  the  pit  are 
reserved.  The  difference  between  their  fate 
and  that  of  the  lovers  is  like  that  between  the 


Conclusion  143 


lot  of  an  aviator  in  an  eternally  invulnerable 
aeroplane  and  of  a  stoker  in  the  burning  hold 
of  an  eternally  torpedoed  ship.  On  this  dis- 
tinction between  the  two  classes  of  ofiFences — 
the  antilegal  and  the  antisocial — the  whole 
fabric  of  Latin  morality  is  based. 

The  moralists  and  theologians  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages,  agitated  as  no  other  age  has  been 
by  the  problem  of  death  and  the  life  after 
death,  worked  out  the  great  scheme  of  moral 
retribution  on  which  the  "Divine  Comedy" 
is  based.  This  system  of  punishment  is  the 
result  of  a  purely  Latin  and  social  concep- 
tion of  order.  In  it  individualism  has  no 
place.  It  is  based  on  the  interests  of  the  fam- 
ily, and  of  that  larger  family  formed  by  the 
commune  or  the  state;  and  it  distinguishes, 
implicitly  if  not  outspokenly,  between  the 
wrong  that  has  far-reaching  social  conse- 
quences and  that  which  injures  only  one  or 
two  persons,  or  perhaps  only  the  moral  sense 
of  the  offender. 

The  French  have  continued  to  accept  this 


144  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

classification  of  offences.  They  continue  to 
think  the  sin  against  the  public  conscience  far 
graver  than  that  against  any  private  person. 
If  in  France  there  is  a  distinction  between 
private  and  business  morality  it  is  exactly  the 
reverse  of  that  prevailing  in  America,  and 
the  French  conscience  rejects  with  abhor- 
rence the  business  complaisances  which  the 
rigidly  virtuous  American  too  often  regards 
as  not  immoral  because  not  indictable.  "Busi- 
ness" tends  everywhere  to  subdue  its  victims 
to  what  they  work  in,  and  it  is  not  meant  to 
suggest  that  every  French  financier  is  irre- 
proachable,  or  that  France  has  not  had  morb* 
than  her  share  of  glaring  financial  scandals, 
but  that  among  the  real  French,  uncontam- 
inated  by  cosmopolitan  influences,  and  espe- 
cially in  the  class  of  small  shopkeepers  and  in 
the  upper  bourgeoisie,  business  probity  is 
higher,  and  above  all  more  sensitive,  than  in 
America.  It  is  not  only,  or  always,  through 
indolence  that  France  has  remained  back- 
ward in  certain  forms  of  efficiency. 


Conclusion  145 


It  would  be  misleading  to  conclude  that 
this  sensitiveness  is  based  on  a  respect  for  the 
rights  of  others.  The  French,  it  must  be  re- 
peated, are  as  a  race  indifferent  to  the  rights 
of  others.  In  the  people  and  the  lower  middle 
class  (and  how  much  higher  up!)  the  tradi- 
tional attitude  is:  "Why  should  I  do  my 
neighbour  a  good  turn  when  he  may  be  getting 
the  better  of  me  in  some  way  I  haven't  found 
out?"  The  French  are  not  generous,  and  they 
are  not  trustful.  They  do  not  willingly  credit 
their  neighbours  with  sentiments  as  disinter- 
ested as  their  own.  But  deep  in  their  very 
bones  is  something  that  was  called  "the  point 
of  honour"  when  there  was  an  aristocracy  to 
lay  exclusive  claim  to  it,  but  that  has,  in 
reality,  always  permeated  the  whole  fabric 
of  the  race.  It  is  just  as  untranslatable  as  the 
"panache"  into  which  it  has  flowered  on  so 
many  immortal  battle-fields;  and  it  regulates 
the  conscience  of  one  of  the  most  avaricious 
and  least  compassionate  of  peoples  in  their 
business  relations,  as  it  regulated  the  conduct 


146  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

'  '  '■—  — • 

in  the  field  of  the  knights  of  chivalry  and  of 
the  parvenu  heroes  of  Napoleon. 

It  all  comes  back,  perhaps,  to  the  extraor- 
dinarily true  French  sense  of  values.  As  a 
people,  the  French  have  moral  taste,  and  an 
ear  for  the  "still  small  voice" ;  they  know  what 
is  worth  while,  and  they  despise  most  of  the 
benefits  that  accrue  from  a  clever  disregard 
of  their  own  standards.  It  has  been  the  fash- 
ion among  certain  of  their  own  critics  to  in- 
veigh against  French  "taste"  and  French 
"measure,"  and  to  celebrate  the  supposed 
lack  of  these  qualities  in  the  Anglo-Saxon 
races  as  giving  a  freer  play  to  genius  and  a 
larger  scope  to  all  kinds  of  audacious  enter- 
prise. It  is  evident  that  if  a  new  continent 
is  to  be  made  habitable,  or  a  new  prosody  to 
be  created,  the  business  "point  of  honour"  in 
the  one  case,  and  the  French  Academy  in  the 
other,  may  seriously  hamper  the  task;  but  in 
the  minor  transactions  of  commerce  and  cul- 
ture perhaps  such   restrictive  influences   are 


Conclusion  147 


worth  more  to  civilisation  than  a  mediocre 
license. 


Many  years  ago,  during  a  voyage  in 
the  Mediterranean,  the  yacht  on  which  I 
was  cruising  was  driven  by  bad  weather 
to  take  shelter  in  a  'small  harbour  on  the 
Mainote  coast.  The  country,  at  the  time,  was 
not  considered  particularly  safe,  and  before 
landing  we  consulted  the  guide-book  to  see 
what  reception  we  were  likely  to  meet  with. 

This  is  the  answer  we  found:  "The  inhabi- 
tants are  brave,  hospitable,  and  generous,  but 
fierce,  treacherous,  vindictive,  and  given  to 
acts  of  piracy,  robbery,  and  wreckage." 

Perhaps  the  foregoing  attempt  to  define 
some  attributes  of  the  French  character  may 
seem  as  incoherent  as  this  summary.  At  any 
rate,  the  endeavour  to  strike  a  balance  be- 
tween seemingly  contradictory  traits  disposes 
one  to  indulgence  toward  the  anonymous  stu- 
dent of  the  Mainotes. 


148  French  Ways  and  Their  Meaning 

r.  .  =3 

No  civilised  race  has  gone  as  unerringly  as 
the  French  toward  the  natural  sources  of  en- 
joyment; none  has  been  so  unashamed  of 
instinct.  Yet  none  has  been  more  enslaved 
by  social  conventions,  small  complicated  ob- 
servances based  on  long-past  conditions  of  life. 
No  race  has  shown  more  collective  mag- 
nanimity on  great  occasions,  more  pettiness 
and  hardness  in  small  dealings  between  indi- 
viduals. Of  no  great  people  would  it  be  truer 
to  say  that,  like  the  Mainote  tribesmen,  they 
are  generous  and  brave,  yet  fierce  and  vindic- 
tive. No  people  are  more  capable  of  impro- 
vising greatness,  yet  more  afraid  of  the  least 
initiative  in  ordinary  matters.  No  people  are 
more  sceptical  and  more  religious,  more  real- 
istic and  more  romantic,  more  irritable  and 
nervous,  yet  more  capable  of  a  long  patience 
and  a  dauntless  calm. 

Such  are  the  deductions  which  the  foreign 
observer  has  made.  It  w^ould  probably  take 
kinship  of  blood  to  resolve  them  into  a  harmo- 
nious interpretation  of  the  French  character. 


Conclusion  149 


All  that  the  looker-on  may  venture  is  to  say: 
Some  of  the  characteristics  I  have  noted  seem 
unamiable,  others  dangerously  disintegrating, 
others  provokingly  unprogrcssive.  But  when 
you  have  summed  up  the  whole  you  will  be 
forced  to  conclude  that  as  long  as  enriching 
life  is  more  than  preserving  it,  as  long  as  cul- 
ture is  superior  to  business  efficiency,  as  long 
as  poetry  and  imagination  and  reverence  are 
higher  and  more  precious  elements  of  civilisa- 
tion than  telephones  or  plumbing,  as  long  as 
truth  is  more  bracing  than  hypocrisy,  and  wit 
more  wholesome  than  dulness,  so  long  will 
France  remain  greater  than  any  nation  that 
has  not  her  ideals. 

Once  again  it  must  be  repeated  that  the  best 
answer  to  every  criticism  of  French  weakness 
or  French  shortcomings  is  the  conclusive  one: 
Look  at  the  results!  Read  her  history,  study 
her  art,  follow  up  the  current  of  her  ideas; 
then  look  about  you,  and  you  will  see  that  the 
whole  world  is  full  of  her  spilt  glory. 

THE  END  (1) 


RE 
TO 

LOA 


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